


Get Brave

by threesmallcrows



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Explicit Sexual Content, Injury Recovery, M/M, Organized Crime, mutual pining misunderstanding and the usual... y'all know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:15:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23974360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threesmallcrows/pseuds/threesmallcrows
Summary: "Sober or not, Matt found Mello’s new face difficult. Looking at it was like watching a Ming vase smash onto the floor of his heart, over and over. All that beauty wasted."Mello blows himself up. Matt takes the opportunity to relapse.
Relationships: Matt | Mail Jeevas/Mello | Mihael Keehl
Comments: 26
Kudos: 95





	1. San Marino / Slauson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being Mello’s prisoner was less sexy than Matt would’ve liked.

Sober or not, Matt found Mello’s new face difficult. Looking at it was like watching a Ming vase smash onto the floor of his heart, over and over. All that beauty wasted.

()

Matt jumped off the wagon sitting on the floor of Mello’s bedroom as he slept. Mello needed to be supervised. Alright. Matt could multitask.

His mouth watered when he slid the needle in.

Headrush.

His head lolled back onto the bed. He drooled a little on the sheet next to Mello’s pajama’d leg.

One full year had passed since Matt’s last hit. It was his longest dry stretch since he’d left Wammy’s. Matt had started using as soon as Mello ran away: antidepressants, opiates, and finally the new love of his life, the big H.

After they did him the unkindness of graduating him, Matt figured he’d be dead before he hit twenty, and then when that passed, he thought twenty-two. Twenty-four, surely.

He was twenty-seven when Mello’s people kidnapped him out of the back of his ‘99 Subaru Forester, where he’d been sleeping with the seat down. The homelessness was just a temporary thing. Just until he got back on his feet. His paraphernalia lay bundled in an old pilled sweater within arm’s reach, like a baby’s pacifier.

Ten years of radio silence ended in a mob stronghouse in Los Angeles. Mello broke him of his heroin addiction efficiently, like breaking a stick, or a horse over your knee. He wore headphones whenever he came into Matt’s cell, so he didn’t have to listen to him hollering bloody murder or begging Mello for his life. He showed no mercy, brooked no argument. When Matt tried to escape one too many times, he knocked him out and chained him by the ankle to the water heater.

“Kinky,” Matt croaked from the floor.

“Don’t try to pick it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We welded it shut,” Mello countered flatly. “Find some boltcutters first.”

“This is a fire hazard.”

“We have a sprinkler system.”

“This is a human-rights violation”—had been Matt’s next argument, but he tripped over the seven-syllable noun and fell flat into silence. He was done being fun and flip. He wanted his damn fix.

Mello never gave him the opportunity to argue about it. Being Mello’s prisoner was less sexy than Matt would’ve liked. Mello never, for example, stalked in, bullied him, shimmied big gun out of tight pants and threatened at close, intimate range. He mainly just gave orders over an intercom, and hung up on Matt whenever he tried to make conversation.

For six months, Matt was kept under 24/7 surveillance in a hundred-square-foot room of the repurposed hotel-cum-prison on San Marino street. He had a bathroom with no door, a window that didn’t open, and a Linux tower and three racks of servers for company. Newly sober, lonely, terrified, and depressed, Matt spent a lot of time masturbating in front of one or the other surveillance cameras, hoping to get Mello’s attention, and an equal amount of time fantasizing about shooting up with Mello and then fucking him into the floor as revenge.

In the end, Mello only let him out because Kira killed sixty-eight of the mob’s guys in one night, and he needed a new getaway driver.

“Sixty-eight sounds like a lot.”

“It’s a lot.”

“Is it bad?”

Mello grunted. “It’s not fucking good.”

He was hunched over Matt’s left leg, installing an ankle monitor on him. Powder-pale and sickly looking, Mello was running solely on several rails of coke. He hadn’t slept in seventy-two hours, since the night of Rod Ross’ weekly poker game, when the men around him had suddenly started dropping like flies. Mello had never seen someone have a heart attack before. Kira must have been in a hurry, he thought, watching the guy two seats to his right lurch onto the card table, scattering the carefully stacked chips like leaves. Some big scoop, maybe a database hack—or a mole. Must have Matt look into that. Ferret out the source, while Mello dealt with the aftermath.

One thing was for sure: he could no longer keep Matt safe on the sidelines, like the fine china you never used. He would have to take his chances with the rest of them.

“Questions?”

“...have to get out?” Matt mumbled.

“Hm?”

“What if I have to get out of the car?”

“Get out? The whole point is that you don’t get out.”

“Yeah, dude, I _get_ it. But like, what if something happens to you? Like you get held hostage or something, and I have to come rescue you?”

“I’m not going to get held hostage.”

“Hypothetically.”

“Then you get out, Matt, jesus christ.”

“Okay. I guess I’m just worried that being outside might freak me out, like a little bit.” Matt smiled wanly at him. “And I don’t wanna freak out while I’m rescuing you. I wanna be super cool.”

“So you’re agoraphobic now.”

“Well, I dunno about a _phobia."_

Fucking christ. He would have to start taking him on walks, like a dog. Why did Matt have to be so sensitive to everything?

Matt wilted. “Dude, you can’t be mad at me about this,” he whispered.

Mello relented. Matt’s beard was long and ragged after months without a razor (out of the question to allow him one—he’d tried to stab one of Mello’s guys with a spare ballpoint pen once). He’d have to get him to shave it.

“We’ll do some practice runs tomorrow,” he said. “Come on.”

Matt wobbled hesitantly near the open doorway with his one fat ankle, like he’d forgotten how to walk.

“Is this gonna shock me?”

“It’s not a fucking dog collar. It’ll just set an alarm off if you go outside the boundaries.”

“Which boundaries?”

Mello clicked his tongue, and finally Matt stumbled out of the room, bewildered as a baby lamb. “Stick with me. That’s all you need to worry about.”

Mello drove them to the house on Slauson. He didn’t sleep with Matt the first night, because he was too tired, dropped unconscious like a full-frontal car crash as soon as his head hit the pillow. On the next day and the day after that, he forgot Matt even existed, busy dealing with the fallout of Kira’s killing spree—another forty-eight hour marathon, burning off the little sleep he’d accumulated.

On the fourth night, ninety minutes into a shallow nap, a nightmare woke him with a shout. His chest twinged with pain. He’d dreamed he was having a heart attack. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and found Matt watching him warily from over the back of the couch.

“Are you okay, dude?”

“Go to sleep.”

“Nah, that’s all I’ve been doing for the last couple days. Why’d you yell?”

Mello’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t think of an excuse that didn’t sound stupid and transparent.

“I had a dream.”

“You should lay off the blow. It can give you really gnarly dreams.”

So Matt knew. Whatever; it wasn’t like Mello had been trying to hide it. “You’d know,” he sniped.

“Pretty much.”

“You’ve tried everything, haven’t you?”

“Pretty much,” he repeated. “Can I have some?”

Mello wanted to throttle him. “You’re a fucking junkie, Matt,” he snapped, “so don’t sit there and pretend like it’s the same between you and me.”

“Tell me how it’s different.”

“Because I’m in control of it.”

Matt smiled, silent.

He was still smiling as Mello knelt over him on the couch and shoved him down.

“You want to know the difference? The difference is that you were fucking homeless when I picked you up, or did you forget?” Mello’s hands rose from his shoulders to his throat. “I have your hospital records. You overdosed three times.”

Matt’s breathing pushed steadily against his fingers. “Maybe I did it just so you could rescue me.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“Nah,” said Matt. Mello felt his hands rise to rub circles around his waist. He rested a hand on each of Mello’s thighs, fingers tickling his abs, thumbs stroking lazily at the edges of Mello’s growing hardon, pressing into the hollow where thigh met groin. “I think you missed me.”

He fought Mello when Mello tried to force Matt’s hand onto him. They scuffled on the couch. Mello ended up sitting on his chest, pressing his dick insistently at Matt’s mouth until he rolled his eyes and opened.

They used to do it like this all the time at Wammy’s: Matt flat on his back on Mello’s bunk, Mello sitting on him, rolling his hips a little at a time. The shallow angle, they had discovered, kept Matt from gagging and Mello from thrusting too much. Matt had tried it on his knees once or twice and he’d nearly vomited. He had an oversensitive gag reflex, would sometimes go into a coughing fit while brushing his teeth.

No longer, evidently. “You’ve gotten better,” Mello panted as Matt groped and squeezed his ass. Shit, he loved how Matt kept his eyes open, glancing up at Mello, like they did in pornos. “Did you do this for smack, too?” He leant forwards onto the couch’s armrest, humping his mouth as Matt’s throat fluttered and struggled around him. “Bet you did, you fucking slut.”

Matt was choking, shoving against Mello’s thighs, so Mello pulled back, allowed him to cough once or twice before pushing back in.

By the time he finished, Matt’s eyes were watery and red, his chin a mess of spit and precum. His voice actually sounded raspy when he spoke:

“Feeling better?”

Probably only Matt could condescend to Mello immediately after letting him fuck his mouth. 

Resisting the temptation to black out onto the couch, Mello swung his leg off of Matt and went into the bedroom.

“Aw, no pillow talk?”

Retrieving the cocaine from the nightstand drawer, he went into the bathroom and flushed it down the toilet.

“That’s a bit melodramatic,” said Matt, leaning against the door.

“It’s realistic.” Mello closed his eyes for a second. He was so tired. “I don’t trust you, Matt.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t deserve to be trusted.”

“Ouch.”

“Don’t use again, or I’ll kill you.”

“Yeah, gotcha. Can I come sleep on the bed? This couch is killing my back.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“There’s only one blanket.”

“I won’t hog it.”

He didn’t want Matt to see him coming out of a nightmare. “Sleep on the floor if your back hurts,” he ordered.

Normally a light sleeper, Mello was so exhausted that he didn’t wake up when Matt lumbered onto the bed. He only realized in the morning, when he awoke shivering and blanketless in the pale light of dawn.


	2. Mariposa I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Travelling from one side of Mello’s lip to the other was like crossing a nation, or from the bright side of the moon to the dark.

For the first two weeks, Matt was on vacation. There was no need to conceal his habit from Mello—under the influence of a fat morphine drip, he was closer to animal than human. His lizard-like gaze startled Matt, the slow blink that tracked the sound of Matt shuffling around the dim bedroom without recognizing who he was.

Once he really woke up though, everything went to hell.

Everything was go-go-go, too much too fast. Mello went straight from his coma to standing in the bathroom, IV stand and all, looking like bloody fucking Mary in the mirror.

“Jesus  _ fucking— _ christ, Mel, you scared the shit out of me. Are you supposed to be up?”

“Is that my gun?”

Matt lowered the Beretta guiltily. “I was just borrowing it.”

“Get your own.”

Matt hesitated. He wanted to hand Mello his gun, but Mello had the counter in a death grip in his good hand, and he didn’t want to provoke him into reaching out.

He’d waited too long. Mello let go of the counter and fell, cracking his head off a cabinet knob for good measure.

Matt did a lot of helping him up from corners, pulling him off of floors. It was like helping a bear get its paw unstuck from a trap. You touched him as little as possible and let go as quickly as you could. 

Probably only Mello could be this hostile while on intravenous morphine. Matt’s neck ached from subconsciously hunching to avoid eye contact. Mello kept trying to aggressively taper, was therefore in terrible pain, and inevitably ended it up taking it out on the only person in sight: Matt. Matt did nothing right. He couldn’t cook, couldn’t clean. He waited too long before coming to help Mello up. He hovered over Mello too much, when he could get up by his fucking self. He stared. Why was he always staring?

“Can I help you?”

Matt looked away.

“Turn that shit down.”

He dialed down the television volume.

Mello was right. Matt wasn’t qualified to care for him. He was barely qualified to care for himself. Once he’d cohabited with an active bedbug infestation for three months because he couldn’t be assed to call the exterminator. He still had lines of dark hyper-pigmented dots leftover from the bites. That was objectively disgusting.

That was how his on-and-off girlfriend at the time had put it: “This is objectively disgusting.”

“M’sorry.”

“I mean, for fuck’s sake, Matty. How can you live like this?”

Generously, she paused to give him a chance to defend himself. Matt shrugged, scratched.

“Fuck this. I’m not coming back around here.”

He sat around for a couple hours after the screen door banged shut, trying to feel sad that he’d been broken up with. He mainly felt nothing. She was right. What was wrong with him?

Remembering this made Matt’s back began to itch. He snuck a hand under his sweaty t-shirt and scratched vigorously. He was relieved Mello hadn’t made him take his clothes off during any of their encounters so far. Wounded or not, Mello’s new body intimidated him. Matt didn’t have a single ab. All he had was bug bites and stoner fat.

“Hey.”

Matt whipped his hand back out guiltily. “Yeah?”

“There’s no food.”

He shuffled to his feet.

“Matt.”

“Hm?”

Gaze fixed on the spiderweb dangling from one ceiling corner, nevertheless hyperaware of the way the light crawled on his face, the waxy sheen of flesh.

“Get meat this time.”

()

Matt had been avoiding the butcher counter. The meat under the fluorescents reminded him of how Mello looked under Matt’s phone flashlight, which Gorman, the mob doctor, had made him hold overhead for two hours, because the clouded ceiling lamp wasn’t bright enough to operate by.

“Next in line.”

Matt was sweating slightly. He wiped his hands on his jeans.

“I said, next!”

()

He sped by the freeway exit to Mariposa and gunned it towards El Segundo. This was where Redd’s house was.

Redd was another geek, like Matt. He ran numbers for the drugs side of the mob’s business. Matt had gotten onto his good side ever since he rewrote the mob’s crumbling accounting software in a three-day mescaline bender, crashed out unblinking on a futon in the basement while Redd’s kids wove in and out, celebrating a birthday.

The garage was open, the door unlocked like usual. Matt went straight in to the kitchen.

“It’s Matt. Hi, Matt.”

Redd’s daughter reminded him of Mello aged eight. Same bruised kneecaps and haircut. “Hey Tiffany,” he said. “Where’s your dad?”

“I dunno.”

“Quit talkin’ to that creep, Tiff.” Redd came lumbering down the stairs. “I told you, you ain’t dating anybody for another twenty years.”

“Da-aad!” she wailed, running away.

“Yo, Redd.” Matt lowered his voice. “I need—”

“Not a good time, Matty.”

“Oh yeah? What’s up?” Bet his wife left him. Their relationship went up and down as regularly as a swing.

“What’s up is Betty told me to go play hide-and-go-fuck-myself.”

Bingo. “Aw, she’ll be back.”

“You’re a fuckin’ optimist, Matty. You’re young and full of shit, so don’t tell me nothin’.”

“I’m actually hella pessisimistic about relationships, like in general. Listen, dude, I need another bundle. And some Xanax if you got some.”

“Fuck your Xannies! I ain’t never gonna get my dick sucked again! And who the fuck’s got Xannies anyway? What’re you, a housewife in therapy? Your hubby runnin’ out on you? Have a joint.”

“I can’t do weed.” The smell was too obvious.

“Christ, now the kid says he can’t do weed!”

“You got any Valium?”

“You want a Roofie next?”

He ended up giving Matt his bundle and two of Betty’s Klonopins. They stuck in Matt’s throat. He went into the kitchen and drank some water from their tap.

“Oh, shit, Matt’s here? Why didn’t you fuckin’ say anything?” This was Jack, Redd’s younger son. “Matt, bro, you gotta play Mario Kart with me.”

“I gotta go, dude. Can’t Tiffany play with you?”

“No, because she’s a girl and she fucking sucks.”

“Shut the fuck up, Jack!”

“Please? Just one game.”

Matt allowed himself to be corralled onto the couch. Increasingly sleepy from the Klonopin, he zoned in and out of the middle of Rainbow Road. He was handily beating Jack anyway. Kid hadn’t figured out the trick to winning was simply to drive in the shortest, straightest lines possible.

It was embarrassing to admit, but he sometimes caught himself fantasizing that he was a member of their family. Redd was just old enough that he could conceivably be Matt’s dad. Matt could’ve been, like, a bastard from a teenaged one-night stand. He wouldn’t mind being a half-sibling to Tiffany and Jack and Will, the cool older brother that taught them to shoot in the backyard and bought them alcohol for their high-school parties.

Wanting a family was one of Matt’s oldest, dirtiest secrets. He had admitted it aloud only once, to his therapist at Wammy’s. All the Wammy’s kids had one. This was a total joke, because past the age of ten nobody said shit to them. Everyone thought they reported straight back to Watari and L. Rumor even had it Near made his cry once, which Mello was insanely jealous of.

Matt felt bad for Mello’s therapist. He liked his. Her name was Dr. Shankar, but she told him to call her Arthi. Matt liked her voice and her long dark braid, and the Rubik’s cubes she kept in her office, which she let Matt borrow.

When he was very young, he once showed her a drawing of himself and Mom and Dad and Puppy that he’d made.

He was rattling on about the dog: “I’d want a bull terrier, and I’d name him Skull, ‘cause that’s like a cool name.”

“I like it. And who’re these guys on the side?”

Matt’s fingers hesitated on the 5x5 he was solving. “Just people.”

“People you know, like at Wammy’s?” When he said nothing, she prompted, “Are they your mom and dad?”

Matt clammed up. He knew this wasn’t supposed to be something he wanted. He’d never even heard Mello say the word “Mom”, let alone that little robot Near. He regretted bringing the drawing, and let go of the cube to tug it back across the desk.

Dr. Shankar let it go. “Do you miss your mom, Matt?”

“No.”  _ Yes.  _ Shameful. He wished fervently that he didn’t remember her at all, like Mello and Near and the rest of them.

Matt got his wish, in the end. Without a photograph or a lock of hair to pin her down, his sparse memories of his mother bleached over the years like water under sun. All that was left was a certain undefinable scent, which he’d catch once or twice a year on a woman at a bus stop or shopping mall, glancing up as she passed without realizing why.

“Woo, yeah bitch!”

Jack had shelled him. Behind them, the screen door banged open.

“Yo, Redd! Where the fuck you at?”

“Yo, Carlos.”

The guy came over to fist-bump Jack, giving Matt a cautious nod. “What’s hanging, lil’ man? Where’s your dad at, huh?”

“Dad! It’s Carlos!”

Matt’s heart sank. Fuck, what the fuck he was doing? He needed to get out of here.

Outside, tucking the bundle into the bottom of the Kleenex box in his console, he saw movement from behind the faded curtains. It was Tiffany, waving at him. He waved back.

()

“Where the fuck were you?”

“Out. Getting groceries.”

“Took long enough,” Mello grumbled. He came over and peered at a grey package of ground pork. “Is this meat bad?”

It probably spoiled sitting in the trunk while Matt played Mario Kart. “Just toss it,” said Matt.

He sat on the couch for two hours, fidgeting with the tasseled edge of one throw pillow, increasingly unable to focus on a DBZ marathon as the Klonopin wore off. He wanted Mello to go to sleep for the day. He usually ran out of steam sometime after lunch and spent the afternoon and evening holed up in the bedroom, glassy on morphine.

The bedroom door scraped shut. Fucking finally.

Jesus, Matt was such an asshole.

Scurrying into the bathroom, he triple-checked the door was locked before banging back a hit. Speedball, a special treat for a rough day. All the dings the day had put in him filled out in ninety seconds. He felt smooth and fresh as a new paint job. Mello had his fix in the afternoon, and so did Matt. Shit was balanced.

The coke gave him the energy and ambition to make dinner (steak and eggs) and the smack kept him from getting down when he burnt the steak. He was up-up-up, a buoy floating above the seas of his shitty thoughts.

He knocked on Mello’s door before pushing it open.

“You up, dude?”

He didn’t have to lean around him to check the drip dial to know Mello was totally cooked. Matt was familiar with what a morphine high looked like. Mello’s blinks were slow as drops of tap water. He looked the way a fuzzy blanket felt.

“You up for eating? I made a lil’ something.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he cut the steak into tiny pieces. He put the fork in Mello’s right hand and molded his fingers around the handle, but his hand just fell into his lap like a stone.

Matt sighed. Floating on his own high, he was able to put aside Mello’s punching-bag treatment of him in favor of feeling unspeakably fond.

“You’re not allowed to get mad at me about this later,” he warned, sticking the fork into Mello’s mouth. “And you better not choke. Gorman didn’t teach me how to do the Heimlich.”

It was surreal, sticking little bits of food into Mello’s mouth and Mello letting him. Chewing and swallowing quietly, instead of tearing Matt’s throat out for daring to be kind.

Matt’s eyes watered slightly. He looked at the ceiling until the water drained back into his face.

“You need to take it easy, dude,” he said. “No more of this walking around for like a mile everyday.”

“I wanna go outside,” Mello said clearly and slowly, like a child afraid of being misunderstood. He never slurred, not even with a train of morphine being run into him.

“Not yet. In a while.”

“I hate being stuck in here.”

“I know. How’s dinner?”

“Burnt.”

_ Like you,  _ Matt thought. “You’ve got a little.” He wiped the corner of his mouth for him.

Travelling from one side of Mello’s lip to the other was like crossing a nation, or from the bright side of the moon to the dark.

Mello’s mouth opened slightly.

“What’s up, dude?”

He licked the salty tip of Matt’s thumb.

“Oh, okay.”

Matt’s finger sunk down to the hilt into his velvet-feeling mouth.

“Oh, wow.” Matt’s blood made the trip downstream in record time, so fast his head spun.

The hand that had failed to lift a fork caught Matt’s wrist and dragged it insistently towards the peak in the sheets. Matt took his finger out of Mello’s mouth in a hurry.

“This isn’t gonna hurt you, right?”

“No.”

“But you’re not just saying that?”

“Get the fuck down there.”

“I didn’t ask because I didn’t wanna hurt you,” Matt kept saying, as he pushed the sheets off Mello’s lap. “Seriously, you have to tell me if it—”

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up.”

Matt fell silent, at last.

()

Exhausted from fighting off a mild infection, Mello soon lost track of who exactly was blowing him. It didn’t matter. It felt nice anyway.

If Mello was anybody other than himself, this moment might’ve turned him around on his hardline stance against recreational drug use. After a week of wretched mornings—the pain when he woke so bad that he began every day puking into a bedside bucket from the nausea of it—the double load of endorphines dealt by sex and opiates just about blew out his weakened system. A regular old blowjob from Matt turned into see-God, speak-in-tongues fucking. It felt so fucking good.

He didn’t last long at all, but he was too high to care; didn’t care about the embarrassing noises he’d made either. The best moment of all was when the boy between his legs raised his messy face and he recognized Matt.

Since he’d woken up, Mello had spent a lot of time staring into the bathroom mirror. Even in the blackest moments he’d never quite thought  _ nobody _ would have sex with him again. He had a mouth that worked and an intact asshole; that’d always be enough for someone. But Mello didn’t want someone. He didn’t want to compromise on sex more than he wanted to compromise on anything. Mello had never thought of himself as vain, but like most beautiful people, he’d taken his looks for granted the way you took breathing for granted before you caught a cold, when it became all you could think about.

In short, he hated how he looked. Which is why it was so healing for him to watch Matt travelling back up his body to lay his head next to Mello’s, bitching the whole way: “Eugh. Gross. You could’ve warned me you were gonna come.”

“Uh huh.”

“Fucking nasty. I bet you were into that.”

Matt had wiped his face clean, but missed a bit of cum in his hair. Mello didn’t mind it. Mark of ownership.

They made out for a couple minutes. Matt relented when Mello started nodding off in the middle of sucking on Matt’s tongue.

“Alright, alright. I think that’s enough for today. Before you rip a stitch or something.”

“It’s fine.”

“You’re falling asleep.”

“I’m awake.”

Matt scoffed quietly. “You’re not.”

It was irritating, the way Matt pushed his arm aside. That he could walk away from Mello like it was nothing, taking the half-eaten steak with him.

“Stay,” ordered Mello.

There was a time when Matt would never have disobeyed him. When he’d have begged Mello for the favor of the pressure of that word around his throat.

Matt paused in the doorway. “I’m around,” he said, as he turned the light off.


	3. Mariposa II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If only Mello would shut up while they were fucking, things would probably be alright.

If only Mello would shut up while they were fucking, things would probably be alright.

But Mello talked a lot more while high than sober. And he always had to be high before he’d deign to open his arms to Matt.

“I wanna get better,” he’d say as Matt kissed under his jaw.

“You are getting better.”

“We need to get back to work.”

Matt wished for the hundredth time that he’d shut up. He pressed his palm briefly over Mello’s mouth, but he wouldn’t tolerate that on any amount of drugs, and bit Matt hard in the fleshy juncture of finger and palm.

“Ow!”

“Don’t fucking do that.”

“I’m bleeding, you asshole. Look.”

Mello licked the cut his tooth had made. Matt shook. “There’ll be time for work tomorrow,” he said.

Matt said this, but he was acutely aware of it running out as he squeezed and hugged Mello like a stuffed animal. Time trailed like a knife down his back. Mello was getting better every day. Matt had already had to relocate his gear to the bottom of the floorboard of his car, after Mello had gotten it into his head to make fried rice, dipping the plastic measuring cup confidently into the sack, inches above Matt’s buried treasure. “You always fucking burn it,” he’d lectured. “You need to _rinse_ it first,” and Matt nodded furiously, his heart scorching in his throat.

He kept telling himself not to get used to the unfettered access to Mello’s body, either, but it was nearly impossible to imagine the decade he’d gone without. Mello always seemed cold when he was on the drip. He reached for Matt thoughtlessly and without shame, like grabbing an extra blanket.

Mello’s palm hit the side of Matt’s face. “Stop thinking,” he demanded.

Matt nodded, happy to punt today’s problems to tomorrow Matt. Mello was sturdy enough that Matt could kind of dry-hump him for five minutes at a time, if he treated Mello like eggshells beneath him.

“Don’t stop.”

“Sorry, it’s kind of tiring,” Matt panted, lowering himself onto an elbow. “Like planking.”

“Whatever. I can do planks for a whole fucking hour.”

Mello was so fucking high. Stifling a laugh, Matt said, “Shit, dude, I bet you can.”

Before Matt could protest, Mello was clambering on top of him.

“Dude, dude—be careful. Holy shit.”

Mello paused, sat atop Matt like a throne. Magnanimously allowing him to arrange the wires, the trailing heart monitor, overgrown like moss, and the long whip of the IV.

He leaned forward to press his hands against Matt’s, squeezing with what he probably thought was a firm grip.

“I’ve always been stronger than you.”

Mello was not much in his lap. He’d lost so much weight. Matt wanted to weep. He was trying, he was trying.

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in,” he said, letting Mello push the back of his hands around on the sheets, like two hockey pucks. “I was just glad you, like, bullied other people instead of breaking my ankles, or whatever.”

“I didn’t bully people.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You used to kick the shit out of other kids.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t fucking _bully_ people, like for no goddamn _reason._ I pick on people to get _results_."

Matt looked away, uncomfortable with the intensity of Mello’s eye contact, like a blue diamond drill. It felt like Mello was maybe, definitely talking about the whole locking Matt up for six months thing, and Matt didn’t want to think about that while both of them were hard.

“Jesus, alright, agreed. Your bitchy nature is a hundred percent justified.”

But Mello wouldn’t let it go: “I know you think I’m mean, sometimes, Matt. But I’m never mean for no reason.”

“—whoah, dude.”

Mello had slipped forwards. Elbows and arms clattered against Matt’s collarbone, forming a haphazard bird’s nest. Bandages smacked flat into Matt’s bare stomach. Matt lay like a corpse in rigor mortis. He was terrified he’d feel wetness blooming between them.

“We’re gonna work tomorrow.”

“Sure. Maybe let’s lie on our sides first.”

“No,” Mello refused flatly. “I want to sleep like this.”

Matt gave up. Mello was already dead weight on his body, erection softening before Matt had a chance to do anything about it. Poor Mello. He stroked the remainder of his glossy head, running strands of hair between his lips like tickly floss. From this angle—darkside tucked against Matt’s skin—it nearly looked like nothing had happened to him at all.

“You are, like, an asshole a lot of the time though. Objectively.”

“Mm. Stop licking my hair.”

“I’m just cleaning it.”

“You’re fucking making it fucking dirtier.”

“Pretty much, dude.”

Matt regretted starting on heroin; he could admit that much. If he were dry, he’d never have to be tempted to leave the bed.

He lay still, waiting for Mello to sleep.

()

Gorman announced he was taking off to Mexico. He was in love. Matt wasn’t surprised. Lately he’d been showing him a lot of Instagram photos. Finger deftly navigating the glass fissures of his cracked Samsung screen to trace the curves of his woman’s bangin’ bikini bod.

Matt had no photos of Mello; he didn’t have to check to know. People who played chess with Kira couldn’t afford nostalgia.

Back when Matt was still in mob jail, Mello had made him break into Wammy’s system and wipe any trace of them out. It was nostalgic for Matt, walking his childhood stomping grounds. Everything looked smaller than he’d remembered. They’d plastered over the holes Matt had punched in the walls, but he could still see the discoloration where the paint didn’t quite match. It made him smile.

“I’m in,” he called towards the ceiling, feeling like every movie ever.

The intercom crackled. “What’re you telling me for?”

So much for Matt’s Hollywood moment. “Should I delete everyone?”

A pause. “No, just us. Is Near in there?”

“Nah. He probably wiped himself as soon as all this bullshit started. Anyway, it’s easy for him, he can just walk right in through the front door. He doesn’t have to phone a friend to help break in.”

“Lucky for him, since I highly doubt he has any fucking friends to begin with.”

“I was kinda friends with him.”

Long pause, during which Matt could feel Mello staring. “You weren’t.”

Matt wasn’t, really. He’d just said that to get a rise out of him. “Sure I was. Like, when you weren’t looking.”

“You had zero friends other than me.”

_Do you enjoy that?_ “Whatever, dude. It’s not like you have any friends either.”

“I don’t need friends.”

“Okay, see, that’s your—like, I don’t have that kind of attitude. Like, maybe I would’ve been totally normal if I never met you.”

“Do you wish you hadn’t?”

“Sometimes. When you’re being a dick. I’m deleting everyone, by the way.”

“What? What the fuck?”

There was no need to tell him this; Matt had just done it in the hopes it would bring Mello busting in through the prison door.

“What’s your damage, man?” he asked him mildly, tapping the Enter key lightly, a quiet taunt. “I was already in there. It was no big. You seriously wanna make things easier for Kira?”

“Near’s going to know you were the one who did that.”

“So what?”

“I’d never have fucking done that.”

“Yeah, you said like two minutes ago. He doesn’t know I’m with you?”

“I don’t know what he knows,” Mello said stiffly. “I don’t exactly talk with him.”

Matt bit his cheek. The fact that Mello was still fronting to Near after ten years was beyond irritating. He shouldn’t have bothered leaving if he was going to stay this hung up on things.

He was sorely tempted to tell him that Near probably didn’t give a shit who Mello was working with, because Near cared very little about Mello overall.

Mello might actually shoot him if he said that out loud. He was childish like that.

Matt wondered if Near knew Matt was in L.A. by now. He wondered if he’d heard about the explosion. He hoped Near actually did care. Him crowing over Mello laid low would be preferable to indifference.

“—be good on your own?” Gorman was saying.

“Uh?” said Matt, returning from his zone-out.

“Matt, man. Are you listening?”

“Sure, yeah. When’re you leaving again?”

“Tonight.”

“Fucking tonight?” Matt gestured at the closed bedroom door. “And what am I supposed to do with him?”

“You can handle him, man. You know the drill.”

Gorman had had Matt practice debriding a couple times. It went okay. The moist shreds of Mello’s skin were jet black and peeled off messily, like picking a packaging label off a box.

“Sure, ‘handle’. Like maybe he won’t die.”

“Good enough, isn’t it? You got enough morphine, right?”

“Yeah, I think.”

“You got money?”

Matt paused, confused. “Isn’t it enough? I need to buy more?”

Gorman laughed. “Not for him. For _your_ junk, man. Mello can’t be going halfsies with you, the shape he’s in.”

()

Fucking Gorman, Matt seethed, glaring at the bottles of morphine lining the closet floor like soda pop. Matt would never fucking do that.

_Sure, you would._

“Mel,” Matt said over the little voice. “Wake up. We gotta do the thing.”

Mello reached over with his eyes still closed, and dialed the drip down. He did this as soon as he woke every morning, and every day he was able to stay sober a little longer.

Mello’s courage grated on Matt. Matt, who had never minded Mello getting all the A’s and winning all the trophies, found that he minded Mello’s refusal to succumb to addiction very much. The tall pedestal of his self-denial crushed Matt in its shadow. In his noble, suffering presence, Matt felt like a piece of shit.

They huddled together in the bathroom. Mello in the tub, Matt crouched on the floor next to him. The television—$75 off Craiglist, balanced precariously on a plastic stepstool in the corner, because the bandage-changing took a long time, and because the silence was unbearable without—blathered Mello’s preferred stream of 24/7 cable news. Someday that thing was gonna topple into the water and kill him, if Kira didn’t get to him first.

“He got Khachatryan.”

Matt scooped Mello’s IV tube out of the bath for the tenth time. “Hm?”

“This guy I used to work with.”

“Could you stop putting your hand in the water?” For the past half hour, Matt had been weighing moving it himself. He was too nervous. Sober, Mello might allow it; he might snap at Matt, too, pull away like Matt had molested him. And Matt didn’t need that shit. He needed to be zen.

Tweezing one wet flap of a bandage, Matt held his breath and peeled. Mello didn’t make a sound. He looked pale, but he always looked pale, on or off the morphine. He closed his eyes when Matt rolled the new bandage over. Matt could see the pulse jumping in his neck.

“Does it fucking matter?” he said.

“I dunno. I don’t think it should be wet.”

Mello draped his wrist over the edge of the tub. One slim, elegant finger dripped water onto Matt’s bare toe. Tortuous. Matt pulled his foot in.

“Gorman hasn’t been around,” Mello said.

“Yeah. He went to Mexico.”

“He couldn’t have left a replacement?”

“I have some numbers and stuff, like, that I could call.”

“Great.”

Matt shrunk. He was trying his best. The raggedy Matt-machine, carrying out the instructions Gorman dribbled out in sporadic texts.

On screen, the faces of young dead men flickered, reflected in Mello’s staring eyes and the water in his lap.

“Can we change the channel or something?” Matt said. “This is depressing.”

“It’s important information.”

“You ever think about how those guys are like all our age?”

“I know, Matt.” Their eyes snagged for a second. “I need to get better.”

“Yeah,” said Matt. “I know.”

()

Alone, Matt drained the blood-vague bathwater. Afterwards, he ambled politely downstairs to vomit into the bins in the alleyway. He didn’t want Mello to hear him, to think Matt thought he was—well, like, gross. Monstrous. Matt just had a weak stomach. That was all.

None of the zombie shooters he’d played had prepared him for the way Mello’s skin had looked under the bandage.

Over the rush of vomit, he heard the bedroom window slam shut.

Matt replaced the bin lid, wiping his sour, streaming nose on his shirt.

The worst part of it was that it probably didn’t matter what Matt did or didn’t think, how hard he did or didn’t get when Mello licked at Matt’s bottom lip. Because Mello was such an insecure bitch. He had been even at the heights of his angel-faced power, and nowadays, even Matt had to admit he looked more like Hell. Mello lacked whatever genes allowed you to be vulnerable in front of another human being. He was simply incapable.

No amount of blowjobs Matt gave were enough apology for the fact that he had saved Mello’s life, instead of leaving him to martyr himself. Not that Mello was the suicidal type, but between the glory of death-by-fire and his current bedridden, scarred, drug-dependent existence, Matt had a hunch to which he’d prefer.

Very likely, he would be rewarded for his service by nothing more than Mello hating him, then leaving him. Possibly forever.

If Matt were a sadistic man, he might’ve considered cutting Mello’s tendons to keep him around, or smashing his ankles in, Kathy Bates-style. But Matt was a masochist, so he did nothing but crawl into the lap of his car and the suck of heroin to hide.

Smells of blood and thoughts of Mello followed him down the spiral of sleep.

()

Eyelids twitching, he dreamt of the warehouse.

Idling outside in the getaway car, Matt had been thinking the same thing he always thought about while waiting, which was: maybe fuck Mello.

The ankle monitor Mello had put on him was a joke—they both knew he could get it off, given enough time alone and freedom. No, there was really nothing stopping Matt from driving away and into the arms of the nearest vein of smack but his loyalty to Mello, which Mello, the self-infatuated little prick, simply _expected_ to have lasted through his decade-long abandonment, the same way he expected the sun to rise, or gravity to exist.

Matt was Matt. Clearly.

Matt tilted the creaky rearview so he could see the door of the warehouse more clearly. I’ve fucked other people, he wanted to tell him. He did this frequently: draft confrontations with Mello that Mello never gave him a chance to have. The new Mello was a cold fish, a professional. He never took Matt’s bait. They had a _working relationship_. When exactly the fuck had he learned to control his temper? What had happened to the tantrums, the boy who’d raged against Near, God, and the rest?

He drummed his fingers on the sticky steering wheel. God, what a shit-looking vehicle. What was the point of being in the mob if you couldn’t even drive pretty cars? What kind of fucking priorities did Mello even have? Justice? Who else in the world gave a single shit? Matt just wanted to be happy. He’d suck Kira’s dick if he could be happy. Fuck Mello. _Fuck_ Mello.

Letting go of the wheel, Matt squeezed his left bicep with his right hand. Envisioned drawing up the needle, shining and pale. His mouth watered. Foot itchy on the pedal.

He was gonna do it. He was gonna drive away.

The rearview mirror blared orange. Matt jumped and turned around. Behind him, the warehouse bloomed in flame.


	4. Mariposa III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So did he want to try for Mello, or what?

Mello announced the next step in his recovery by shaving his head in the bathroom sink.

“It was never going to grow back anyway,” he said to Matt’s gaping face in the mirror. He thrust the clippers at him. “Do the back for me. I can’t reach.”

Mello’s skull was fragile and warm as an egg between Matt’s hands. His face looked small without the blonde pouf around it.

Being forced to shave the rest of Mello’s hair off felt like punishment. The last blonde locks fell to the floor, ending yet another of Matt’s daydreams of everything going back to the way it was before. Mello’s eyes in the mirror were hostile. Dared him to breathe a word of complaint.

“Your head has a weird shape.”

“Yours probably does too, under all that fucking hair.”

“Yeah, I could use a haircut. You look like a baby skinhead.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I think it works on you,” lied Matt. “Like with the scar, and everything. Looks badass.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Mello accused immediately.

“I’m not.”

“It doesn’t matter how I look anyway.”

It did, obviously. Did Mello think Matt would just fuck anything?

Hesitantly, he touched the fuzzy top of his head. It felt alien. He didn’t like it. Matt hated that Mello hadn’t asked permission before throwing away one of Matt’s favorite textures.

Frowning, Mello moved away, so that Matt’s hand fell through empty space to slap against his side.

He let Mello pick up the hair from the floor, since he was doing so much better, getting so well. He did a neat job of it. Matt couldn’t find a single strand later. Didn’t matter how long he spent crawling around on his knees.

()

Rod Ross came to visit. He was the first person other than Gorman to breach the airlock of the apartment since they’d moved in. Mello must’ve called him; it certainly wasn’t Matt, who didn’t realize exactly which asshole was banging on the door until he after he kicked it open.

“—yeah, one fuckin’ minute, fucking—oh. Hey.”

Ross grinned at him. His teeth were like backup thugs at an arms deal. Intimidating by dint of size and number.

“Yo, Matthew. How’s it going?”

He only knew Matt’s name because they had talked a few times about Mello, back when it was still uncertain whether he’d succumb to all the melted flesh and missing skin. Matt had been uncomfortable putting Mello’s status into words, so he had mainly texted Ross photos of him, laid out like Dracula in his coffin.

“Rod,” nodded Mello, stepping out of the bedroom.

“Jesus fuckin’ christ, you’re a pretty sight.”

“Thanks.”

“At least you look like less of a faggot now.”

Mello smiled nastily. “Oh, don’t worry about that.”

Ross must’ve put word out, because an army of men came trooping up the stairs in the next week. The apartment felt very crowded with more than two people in it, especially when those people insisted on open carrying. Matt wondered if there was, like, an umbrella rack equivalent for guns. Maybe he should put a box out on the kitchen table or something.

He was curled up in the corner with headphones on, but one speaker was kind of on the fritz, so Mello’s conversations kept drifting in, interrupting the soothing sounds of the Ocarina of Time soundtrack:

“... no, the one out east…”

“... then what the fuck is he doing? Move it to…”

“... fucking worried about you.”

Matt paused his game. The sudden sotto voce and hissed Spanish had caught his attention. He lifted one pad off his ear, but he still couldn’t make out Mello’s reply through the bedroom door, which was shut.

It would be unbearably lame for them to open the door and catch Matt with his ear against the wood, so he stayed on the couch. Also, he didn’t want Mello to know he understood Spanish.

“You just disappeared. I had to find out what happened from fuckin’ Finn.”

This time Mello’s reply was loud enough for Matt to make out, with his slightly nasal, European-sounding accent: “I’m sorry, did you expect me to phone around? I was busy not dying.”

“You couldn’t find time in a month?”

“You have no idea what it’s been like.”

“I could’ve come by, if you’d called me. I would’ve taken care of you.”

“I don’t have time for this.”

Matt kept his eyes down when the door opened, modest as a nun. He glanced through his eyelashes. The guy was fucking big, thick where Matt was lanky, and could give Mello a run on per-square-inch tattoo density.

His looks clashed completely with his last, whispered sentence: _I would’ve taken care of you._

First mistake, thought Matt. Never tell Mello he’s being taken care of. He circled his right bicep with his hand, mentally trying to compare sizes. Did Mello like those bowling-ball looking arms? Did he enjoy looking at guys who walked with their arms perpetually slightly stuck out, like a kid with a puffy snow jacket on?

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Thinking about working out?”

Matt flipped him off before resuming his game.

Astoundingly, this guy was not the last of Mello’s boyfriends to come around. As far as Matt could tell, Mello’s type was scary-looking but essentially soft-hearted guys, who all seemed terribly hung up on him, and would linger around the apartment, discussing nothing important and waiting for Mello to put his dick in their mouth. The fact that Mello didn’t give any of them the time of day was cold comfort, because he rarely gave Matt the time of day anymore, either. He wanted to talk about nothing but Kira and mob business. The morphine went from daily ritual to occasional evening treat, and Mello didn’t reach for him when he took it anymore; he just went straight to sleep. Productive and healthy.

The message was clear: vacation was over. Reluctantly, Matt packed his sex memories and wet dreams away, and went back to being Mello’s sidekick.

He spent a lot of time running errands for Mello, since it was still an ordeal for him to get down the stairs. This was convenient for Matt, too, since it was too risky to use in the house anymore. L.A. gridlock provided ample opportunities to get his fix. Like the ladies who did makeup in their rearview mirrors, Matt was adept at multitasking.

Steering one-handed, he ejected a Mariah Carey CD out of his CD player and tapped out a shaky line onto its surface. Today, Mello wanted him to go all the way out to Santa Monica to fetch some of his things.

“I’m sick of lying around in a bathrobe all day,” he’d complained. “Whose is this anyway?”

“I dunno. It was in the closet when we got here.”

“I look like fucking Hugh Hefner.”

More like Harvey Dent. “You got the slippers too,” said Matt. He’d been secretly enjoying Mello flapping around in the enormous robe, pantless and (often) pantyless, because clothes were difficult for him to navigate.

Somebody honked. Matt hit the clutch, raising his head from the CD and giving the guy the bird. Honking on the freeway should be a cardinal fucking sin. So unnecessary. He’d only been parked for a second.

Slotting himself between big rigs and Hondas, Matt wondered what Mello’s house would be like. Back at Wammy’s all their furniture had been standard-issue, their room devoid of grace, undecorated by anything but crusty tissues, sneaker smell, and the single morbid picture of a bleeding saint Mello had taped to the wall next to his bunk.

Matt had spent a lot of time looking at that guy. He wasn’t issued (had refused) a new roommate after Mello left, and spent many nights curled in Mello’s empty bunk, counting the feathers in the fletching of the arrows piercing Sebastian’s side as if they were a code that would reveal to him where the fuck Mello had gone.

Inspired by an afternoon screening of _National Treasure_ , he even held a lighter over the paper one night to see if there was a lemon-juice message. There was no message. The paper caught on fire. Matt gave up. He quit sleeping in his bunk when the sheets stopped smelling like him.

A BMW merged abruptly into his lane without signalling. Matt allowed it. Benevolent as Buddha. The dope really brought out Matt’s best side. 

Mello struck him as the kind of guy who might’ve developed good taste over the years. Keep a nice house, maybe own some art. Matt wasn’t much for housekeeping. His idea of home was a room with Mello in it. Somewhere they could ignore the silverware and eat with their hands, sit on counters, fuck on floors. Little extraordinaries.

Maybe Mello had a lot of rosaries up. Maybe he had a sex dungeon. For sure Matt was gonna rattle through all his drawers, look for toys or naughty pictures he could give him shit for.

The address Mello had given him led him to a luxury apartment complex, close enough to the beach that its lobby smelled of salt. When he opened the door, the smell and sounds of something cooking clanged out like a warning. Matt paused, looking up and down the corridor before taking his gun out of his waistband. It couldn’t have been the wrong address; the key Mello gave him worked.

Edging down a dim hallway, Matt emerged weapon-first into the large, sparse living room. His eye caught on the bizarre sculpture in pride-of-place in its center, which was so shiny that Matt could see himself in it—was Mello into statues that looked like toy balloons?—and so didn’t notice for a moment the man watching him from the kitchen with a gleaming butcher knife.

Christ, Matt’s reaction time was shot to shit. If the guy had had a gun, he’d be dead already.

They stood for a moment.

“Matthew?”

Matt shrugged. _Who’s asking?_

“You’re Matthew. Right?” The guy put the knife down, which startled Matt into raising the gun slightly. He put his hands out.

“Hey, man, it’s fine. I’m Hugo. Mello told me about you.”

Oh.

For fuck’s sake.

()

Twenty minutes into driving home, stuck in even worse traffic than he’d had coming out, Matt finally made up his mind to have a fight with Mello.

Usually Matt wasn’t the type to begrudge other people their freedoms. If Mello had slept around in their ten years apart, well, so had Matt. But did Mello’s exes have to be so ever present? So abundant, and so good-looking?

Could he at least not send Matt to their houses?

The image of Hugo Asunción rifling through the shared dresser drawers, the comfortably intermingled sweaters and shirts, lodged burning in Matt’s windpipe, like a bite of pizza scarfed straight from the microwave.

Matt glanced at the cardboard box of clothes buckled into his passenger seat. He fantasized briefly about setting them on fire, and phoned Mello instead.

“What is it?” Mello demanded the instant he picked up.

“Nothing,” said Matt, already thrown off rhythm by his strident tone. Like Matt had interrupted something really important. Someone was ranting and raving loudly in the background. Sounded like a fucking Pentacostal revival.

“I got your stuff.”

“Okay.”

Matt sensed Mello’s finger hovering over the cancel-call button and added hurriedly, “You didn’t say I wasn’t going to your—”

“Hm?”

“Could you turn that shit down? What the hell is that? Russian?”

“Lithuanian.” Silence fell. “It’s Kira cult shortwave radio.”

“Seriously? Is that a thing now?”

“It’s an entire genre. This one’s trending.”

“God, I hate people. I was saying, you didn’t tell me I wasn’t going to your house.”

“I don’t keep a lot of things at my house.”

“He wanted to know if he could come over.”

“And what’d you say?”

“I told him I’d ask you.”

“Funny. I’d have told him to fuck off, if I were you.”

Matt didn’t feel like probing whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. “So can he?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t mind that.”

“I didn’t know you were, like. Seeing someone.”

“I’m not _seeing_ him,” Mello scoffed. “I don’t _see_ people.”

“Oh, my bad. I just figured, because you had a lot of stuff there. Looked like you were pretty settled in.”

“My things are in a lot of places. Is there something else you wanted to say to me?”

“Nope. Not really.”

“Alright,” Mello said, and hung up.

()

Matt felt increasingly nauseous as he drove. Lovesick—or maybe just the dope wearing off.

Well, he could fix the second one. Taking the next exit off the freeway, Matt hung a left under the overpass, pulled over and reached down for the edge of the floorboard. Toeing off one sneaker—no socks, he’d run out of clean ones—he rubbed his sweaty foot back and forth against the polyester car seat to dry it off, mixing the heroin absentmindedly on the table of his knee. Maybe he could borrow one of Mello’s Gold Toes, he thought, feeling better already listening to the burbling of the liquid. If he could get his damn big feet in the things. He tossed the lighter aside, waving the needle over the base of his big toe like a sniper pointing a rifle. A bonus: if he bled it wouldn’t show. All of Mello’s socks were black.

Matt deserved this. It was gonna be a long drive back.

Ten seconds, blastoff. Matt unspooled. A smile spread like syrup. The consistency of the euphoria never failed to impress him. It was as reliable as an airport security queue, or bullshit at the DMV.

Caught up in his floating, Matt failed for a while to notice the tapping at the car window.

()

“Someone really liked your clothes.”

Mello glanced up and frowned. The cardboard box was smudged with blood. “Jesus, what’d you do?”

“I didn’t _do_ anything, man. I’m not you. I don’t do things that like, induce people to mug me.”

“I’ve never been mugged.”

“That’s not that surprising.”

“Successfully, at least. Why didn’t you just shoot them?”

“Jesus, Mello.”

“What?”

Sometimes Matt wondered what Mello would have done if he been the one to get the first notebook. This wasn’t a line of thinking he liked to pursue too far. “Nothing,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t fast enough.”

“Next time, just shoot them.”

“I don’t want to go to jail, dude.”

“Then call me. Christ, you don’t even think I’m good for that?”

“I’m sure you’re very professional,” Matt mumbled. He closed his eyes as Mello came around the table to prod at the openings on cheek and forehead. “You’re hot.”

“I’m not in the mood, Matt.”

“Neither am I. You should take some Tylenol. Did you sleep at all last night?”

“Are there bandages in the house?”

“Is that a joke? Under the sink—but like, dude, I think you should go lie down for a while first. I don’t want you to get fucking sick or something.”

“You go fucking lie down,” Mello shot back. “Just let me deal with your shit.”

“Maybe Doc Matt should handle it,” Matt joked weakly, wincing as Mello dabbed stinging alcohol on his cut cheek. “Since I’m kind of the pro, between us.”

Mello held a towel-wrapped handful of ice cubes against Matt’s face while Matt held the back of his hand against Mello’s forehead.

“You do feel hot. Does your head hurt?”

Mello’s head hurt all the time since he’d gotten off the painkillers. It was hard to tell whether this was an overwork-headache, a Kira-headache or fever-headache.

“Does yours?”

“Kinda. If I start puking I guess we’ll know if I’m concussed.” Matt stood, pushing Mello’s hand and the ice cubes away. “I’m gonna take your temperature. Do we have a thermometer?”

“You tell me.” Mello pressed the towel against his own forehead. The cold did feel nice. “Some fucking doctor.”

“Bingo.” Matt emerged with a little glass tube, which he wedged under Mello’s right armpit assertively.

“Is that mercury? They still make those?”

“Uh-huh. Don’t crack it, I guess. Hold your arm against your side, or it won’t read correctly.”

Mello was realizing that he might’ve never used a thermometer before. He had thought they had to go in your mouth. “It’s weird that you’re good at this.”

Matt smiled wryly. “It’s a lot easier than changing a burn dressing.”

“And where’d you learn to do that?”

“Gorman and Youtube, mostly.”

Matt took the thermometer out. He wouldn’t let Mello see it, holding it up to the kitchen light and squinting. The light highlighted the reddening blotches on his upturned face. His left eye was already starting to swell into a proper shiner. The bloodied cardboard box sat dead-center on the kitchen table, like a monument to Mello’s selfishness. Mello pulled out a shirt and fiddled with the hem.

“Do you even know how to read that thing?”

“101,” concluded Matt. “Like the freeway. Take some Tylenol with me, and then you’re going to bed.”

“I can’t sleep. It’s like fucking eight o’clock at night.”

“Then you can lie there and try.”

Mello nearly told Matt that he could sleep in the bed too, if he wanted to.

“Mel,” he said, as he was dimming the lights in the bedroom.

“Yeah.”

“Can I borrow some socks?”

Mello closed his eyes. “Of course, Matt.”

()

Back in the kitchen, Matt stretched and stretched a pair of Mello’s socks over his feet until they fit. The flesh of his feet shone pale through the strained Spandex. Well, those were never getting back to their old shape. He put on one of Mello’s shirts, too, since the neck of his own was stained with a bib of blood. Then he dragged a chair in front of the fridge and sat in front of the open door for a while, enjoying the feeling of the various hurts on his face slowly going numb.

Matt had a decision to make.

The muggers had taken every gram of Matt’s dope, in addition to his phone, wallet, and a few of Mello’s winter coats. For the first time since the day Mello blew himself up, Matt was out dry.

Matt stretched the neck of Mello’s shirt over his nose, breathing him in. For a decade, Matt had blamed his bad habits on him. Mello was his favorite boogeyman, the great tormentor. He had broken Matt’s fucking heart. Like a good insanity defense, Matt couldn’t be held culpable for what he’d done to cope.

The problem was that that had all turned out to be bullshit. Because Mello really _had_ come back. He _had_ slept with Matt.

Matt’s easy heart melted in the wake of the look Mello had given him as he held the ice to his cheek. Maybe Mello wouldn’t hate him forever. Maybe Matt could manage his insecure, bitchy, neurotic hangups just as he’d managed them as a child.

So did he want to try for him, or what?

Back at Wammy’s, Matt’s year 4 English teacher had a favorite saying: “Let’s get set up for success.” For Matt, this had usually meant confiscating the Gameboy and various Rubik’s Cubes, lining up his pencils. Unlike Mello, who was usually sitting in the corner, grinding his teeth and raring to go, Matt had to be suspended in a perfect environment to accomplish anything. The clocks could not be ticking too loudly, and the room could not be too warm.

Rising unsteadily, Matt went over to the sink. His head throbbed like hammer beats. He turned the tap on and plugged the sink up, then went around the house gathering every device capable of communication (Matt’s laptop, Mello’s, Mello’s phone, Matt’s burner), and threw them in. He washed a dish or two, killing time, before he finally committed, taking his car key off its ring and throwing it down the fire escape.

Dressed in Mello-costume, Matt felt like a superhero. Proud and brave. He wished someone were around to congratulate him.

Mello shifted slightly when Matt cracked the bedroom door. “Get out,” he muttered, feeling Matt shove his way onto the narrow bed.

“In a minute.”

“You’ll get sick.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Mello performed the minute-long ordeal of shifting to face Matt. In the gloom, his face was already ripening into bruises, like a night-blooming flower.

“Sorry you got mugged.”

“‘S okay. Not your fault.”

They fell asleep before nine, Mello’s sweet-sick breath stirring the fringes of Matt’s hair, Matt holding him like a prize.

()

The nightmare started before twenty hours was even out. Matt hadn’t been as disciplined with the drug use as he’d thought.

Aching, he dragged the TV and the microwave into the bedroom, building them a fortress of books (for Mello) and GameBoy cartridges (Matt). He was setting up for success; also, there was no guarantee he’d be in shape to move in another day or two.

“Are you sick, too?” Mello sounded hoarse and wheezy, already worse after a single night’s sleep.

“I think I caught the flu from you, dude.”

Mello blazed at his back. Fuck, had Matt gotten him infected during one of the dressing changes? He made him sit up and drink, finishing the rest of the water bottle himself.

They watched TV for a while; some game show where couples competed to see who knew the other one better. Trying to keep himself distracted, Matt silently played along.

“—Shuba’s turn, now. Shuba, when did Rashid get his first tattoo?”

The week after Mello turned fifteen. Matt remembered because he’d gotten him a fake ID as a birthday present—witty, he’d thought—which Mello had used to get into the parlor.

“And where did you two have your first kiss?”

On Mello’s bunk at Wammy’s.

“They ask really fucking boring questions,” said Mello.

“For real. What’d you ask if you were hosting?”

“I don’t know. When’d you first raw dog it?”

“Fucking typical, you sex freak.” Matt squinted at the ceiling, thinking.

Mello smacked him in the head.

“Ow! What?”

“Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Just stop.”

Matt’s smirk was interrupted by the roiling of his stomach. He raised the TV volume politely before leaving to puke.

“Jesus,” said Mello when he came back in, wiping his mouth on the inside of his shirt. “You’re more sick than me.”

“You’re stronger than me, remember? I haven’t had a flu shot in like forever.”

“You also eat around two vegetables a year and smoke like it’s the ‘60s.”

“Whatever. That’s not how germs work.”

“Your immune system is probably like Swiss fucking cheese.”

“Yeah.” Mello’s fingers were dangling over the edge of the bed, so Matt reached up and caught them. “It’s cool if I keep sleeping on the bed, right? So you can keep coughing on me and like, get me even sicker?”

()

But Matt did not, in fact, sleep on the bed. He spent most of the next two days in the bathroom, moving only when Mello needed it, and then not moving even when Mello did.

The only problem with getting clean in eight days meant that Matt first had to be clean for four days, and before that two, and an hour, and thirty minutes, and sixty seconds, ten, one—which was, simply, eternity.

Time moved real fucking slow when you were liquefying.

Matt’s eyeballs slopped like soup in his skull. His joints loosened and his teeth wobbled in his mouth. He kept sticking his hands into his mouth to check them and then getting scared by the sight of mucus and throwup slicked thickly on his fingers, the evidence of his melting. His leg seized and kicked until the muscle felt like a piece of roadkill, and he, like Mello in the next room over, froze and boiled by the minute.

Matt counted sheep; he counted seconds. He turned on his video game and the colors and motion overwhelmed him and made him puke until his ribs ached. He sat on the toilet and unscrewed and rescrewed a pill bottle cap over and over, and counted how many times he’d done that. He wished Mello were well so he could chloroform him, or knock him out with a baseball bat.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Mello as he dragged himself in to take a piss. He didn’t bother asking Matt to get out because he wasn’t strong enough to, and Mello wasn’t strong enough to help him. “Why’re you so fucked up?”

“I don’t know,” said Matt, from where he was hunched trembling in the bathtub. He drew the shower curtain shut so that Mello could have a little privacy. “‘M sorry.”

In a sense, his plan was going off wonderfully. With the gadgets dead in the sink, the 48 hours of relative physical mobility gone, faced with the monumental tasks of standing and walking and talking to get his fix—Matt found it a little easier to lie down and wait for death or sobriety to crush him underfoot.

He really might’ve made it, if Mello hadn’t been so damn sick.

Matt must’ve read the label at least fifty times by now. _Ask your doctor before use if you are pregnant,_ like a chant, _Questions or comments? Call toll free. Stop use and ask a doctor if fever lasts more than 3 days._

It had been at least 3 days. Felt like 3 fucking years. Mello held steady at 101. It panicked Matt to hear him delirious and nightmaring. Reminded him of the days after the warehouse.

Nobody was changing Mello’s dressings. Nobody was holding water to his mouth or microwaving him soup. None of his fucking boyfriends were coming around now that Matt needed them. When it came down to the wire, it was, as always, just the two of them.

After Mello slept for sixteen hours straight, Matt got a little scared.

Fuck. He was gonna need to phone Gorman.

The issue was that there was no longer a phone in the house.

He would have to get out of the apartment, walk all the way down the stairs, and ask the lady who owned the salon downstairs to borrow her phone. If he could convince her to open the door to him, looking the way he was.

Then he remembered it was Monday night. The salon was not open on Tuesdays.

Matt nearly sobbed. It hurt to think. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do this anymore. He had fucked up. He was sorry. Sorry, Mello. Sorry Mom.

And the devil turned ‘round.

From the closet door, one crystalline bottle of morphine winked.

He’d kept just one around. Because he’d thought… what if Mello needed it...

Fuck!

()

The second time Matt saved Mello’s life, he figured, would be the last.

He didn’t think things were gonna work out between them after all.


	5. King Street

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hadn’t he sort of left Wammy’s because of him? Because Matt would’ve married him at the drop of a hat; because it was too early to get married.

Matt ran into another guy climbing the stairs to Mello’s flat.

They paused in the narrow stairwell, assessing one another like cats on an alley wall. The smell of cologne (the guy) arm-wrestled the stink of cigarette smoke (Matt).

It wasn’t much of a contest. He was pretty, Matt thought. No doubt he’d step in to find Mello looking flush and well-fucked.

"Wassup."

"Yo."

Matt squeezed past. He hoped his cigarette rubbed off on him. He hoped he'd have to do the laundry as soon as he got home.

The shower was running when Matt opened the door. Fucking bastard.

He lit up at the kitchen table, even though his lungs itched in protest, fighting their fifth cigarette in an hour. He wanted to tar up Mello’s space a little. Char a hole in one of the kitchen towels, or leave crumbs on the bedsheets.

Mello emerged from the bathroom, hair dripping but fully dressed. Professional of him. He’d probably been face-down in the mattress thirty minutes before, but apparently Matt would not be granted even a glimpse of bared chest.

“Hey,” said Matt.

“Hi.”

He tapped ash onto the table. “Sorry. Do you mind…?”

Mello looked at him with a face that could’ve meant anything. He dug around in the recycling, pulling out an empty can and setting it on the table between them like an international boundary marker.

“Thanks.”

“Mm-hm. How’re you?”

Matt paused, taken by surprise. He wasn’t sure how to answer that.

Most of a year had gone by.

Matt had moved out a long time ago. He'd told Mello he had a girlfriend. Sometimes, this was true—he did have girls over to his unpleasant apartment on the west side now and again. But mostly it was just Matt and his heroin lines, the spare hours, and the striped sunshine slumping through the windows, which were barred even though he lived on the third floor.

Anyway, Matt hadn’t had to put up much of a pretense. Mello had been happy to let him go. The humiliation was too much for him. Ultimately he was unable to handle the sight of his best friend-turned-nursemaid shambling around like a living debt in the background, washing plates so they were still greasy, missing great swaths of floor with the vacuum, and burning the dinner. Matt couldn’t do any damn thing, but he had still managed to save Mello’s life. Unfortunately for him, Mello wasn’t good at being saved. He healed up slowly but surely, marking his progress by getting nastier and nastier until Matt caved, took the hint and the couch when he left, since Mello didn’t want it, anyway.

Fine. Mello moved out soon after, too. The yellow house on Mariposa lay empty. The dust built up, a little thinner in the places where their furniture once sat.

“I don’t know,” Matt said, finally.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. How’re you?”

“Good.”

Mello answered immediately, without a shred of hesitation.

Matt probably should’ve just said good too. It was enough to lie. He didn’t need to soul-search every time Mello asked him a question. Wasn’t like Mello wanted to hear the answers anyway.

()

Mello drove them out towards South Central. They passed the exit to Mariposa on the way. Neither of them mentioned it.

Mello wanted a house wired up. This was not exactly a specialist job; he could’ve gotten anybody to do it, but he had instead messaged Matt. 

The fact was that Mello wanted to reestablish a connection. Ten months’ distance had calmed him down. After he had cooked his own meals, walked without help, fucked other boys, killed a couple men, taunted Near, threatened the SPK, continued to evade Kira, continued to live—overall, convinced himself that he was an fully-functioning and capable adult—he began once again to allow himself the possibility of Matt.

Matt, Matt. So much of his life driven by the boy sitting silent in the passenger seat. Hadn’t he sort of left Wammy’s because of him? Because of the complacent life beckoning at age sixteen from the upper bunk? Because Matt would’ve married him at the drop of a hat; because it was too early to get married. Because Mello could have hid in him forever, from greatness and destiny. Been nothing. Just his.

He could never tell him this. It would only hurt and confuse him.

Mello snuck a sideways glance. The air conditioning ruffled the ragged feathers of Matt’s hair. It was getting long. Guess his girlfriend didn’t mind.

Mello was haunted. He felt he might lose him soon. They were like two trains which had run parallel for years before Mello jumped the rails. Now, by chance, they were pulled into the same station, but if Mello didn’t act, the curve of the track would gradually bend them away from one another, until he was again running alone in the night. And he didn’t think they’d meet a third time. The world wasn’t that kind.

()

Mello pulled them up to the lot on King. The house looked ordinary on the outside, but inside it was gutted.

Matt kicked an empty beer can off a staircase with no handrail. “Nice place. Used to be a hotel?”

“How’d you know?”

“They do their wiring in like, this unique way.”

“You always have the weirdest information.”

“I was an electrician’s assistant for a while.”

Mello paused, waiting for the punchline, but none came.

“I know. Don’t rag on me, man,” Matt sighed. “It gave me something to do.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Like, you’ve probably never had a normal job in your whole life.”

“Did you learn a lot from your normal jobs?”

Matt shrugged. “I guess I was trying to learn to be a normal person,” he said. He cracked open his oily black toolbox, bristling with electric bugs and color-coded coils of twisted wire. Normal stuff. “How many rooms you want done?”

“Ten, twelve to start.”

“To start, jesus, alright. You sure you wanna stick around for this? It’s gonna get old real fast.”

“I’m not busy today.”

“Alright.” They moved from sweltering room to sweltering room for the next two hours, Mello putting his foot on the bottom rung of the rickety ladder Matt had brought for balance, handing him things from the box.

“Damn, it’s hot as Satan’s balls in here. Is there a fan or something?”

“Not unless you brought one.”

“You wanna fan me, then, since you’re so busy standing around?”

“I’m supervising.” 

Matt clambered down the ladder again. Mello noticed a tiny jewel glinting in his left ear; the kind of baby stud they gave you for new piercings.

“You got a new one.”

“Huh?”

Mello pointed at his own ear.

Matt touched his ear like he was surprised to find the earring there. “Oh, yeah. I guess.”

“I like it.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Matt quit bustling when Mello lifted the hem of his shirt and slid one cool hand underneath. His back was ferociously sweaty. Mello’s hand must feel good on it, like an icepack. He wanted to lick the salty nape of Matt’s neck clean, wanted to put the metal stud of the earring in his mouth and pull until it hurt.

“So are you seeing someone right now?” he asked. “Girlfriend?”

“Uh. Unh-unh.”

“Boyfriend?”

Matt laughed nervously. “I’ve never had a boyfriend.”

Good. Mello slid his hand around to the front, looking for gut to pinch. He loved that Matt came with handles. “That’s good.”

“Aren’t you—aren’t you seeing that guy?” Mello’s hand had reemerged from under the shirt to press over Matt’s crotch, accounting for the stutter.

“Which guy?”

“I dunno. I saw some dude on the stairs.”

“Oh, him. I can get rid of him whenever.” Matt was still fiddling with the cables in his lap, so Mello licked his ear to make him stop. Matt had this thing about his ears. The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had seen fit to wire them directly to his dick. “He’s nothing,” he whispered, nibbling the freshly-pierced earlobe, watching a blush rise and spread blotchily over Matt’s throat and cheeks.

“That hurts, asshole.”

“Does it?” Mello bit down; Matt wouldn’t have mentioned it if he hadn’t wanted him to.

“Ah—ow, fuck.”

Matt was so good for him.  _ I missed you. Do you miss me?  _ Matt had leant one hand onto the concrete, one white flag raised; if Mello got him up onto his knees he’d basically be on all fours.

Mello was starting to shove at him when Matt cleared his throat and said, “Man, lemme—I got to finish this.”

“Finish it later. You’re on my clock anyway.”

Matt batted at his hands. “Dude, come on.” Hard shove. “Mel, stop.”

Mello stopped. “What?”

“I dunno. Are you okay?”

_ “Me?” _

“Like, are you like healed up and shit?”

“Yeah. Sure. I’m great.” He pulled his shirt over his head so that Matt could see the scar in all its glory.

“Wow, jesus.” 

“It looks worse than it is. What’s up?”

“Nothing, dude. I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I’m glad too. You mad at me?”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

Mello shrugged. “There’s a few fucking reasons.” He tried to say it lightly.

“I’m not mad, man. I just…” Matt scrubbed his hand over his face. “I don’t know. Maybe I am, like, a little pissed off or whatever.”

“Tell me why.”

Matt’s eyes slid all over the place. The mood was gone, gone, gone. Blown to bits on the floor. “You were,” he started. Stopped. “Like, you kinda treated me pretty shitty back there, dude.”

“I was in a lot of pain.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I took it out on you. That was unfair.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry, Matt.” He tried to say it simply, without drama, but of course it was dramatic when Mello never apologized to anyone for anything.

Matt’s head ducked and bobbed, hiding his face beneath his hair and the excuse of a nod. “Ah, no, it’s good. Apology accepted.” But he still wouldn’t meet his eyes; his fingers clutched one twisted wire between them like a shield.

“Do you want me to leave you alone?” Mello asked, smarting.

“No, it’s fine. Just, uh, I’ll finish this,” he mumbled. “Almost done.”

But Mello put his shirt back on. He could accept what Matt wouldn’t say: that, for whatever reason, Matt didn’t want him. Alright. There was nothing to do but move on.

()

Matt was in the shower jacking off within five minutes of getting home, pausing only briefly in the living room to tap out a thick, heady rail, which he snorted so viciously off the glass coffee table that his nostrils itched and exploded into blood halfway down the hall.

Sitting in the spray—too damn dizzy, he didn’t trust himself with standing—he tilted his head back, stroking himself one-handed and pinching his nose with the other. Blood leaked from between his fingers. It tasted like the ocean on his lips.

“It isn’t gonna work out between us.”

That’s what Matt had meant to say. But jesus fuck, Mello had made things difficult. Matt had never seen him like that, never been on the receiving end of his flirting, similar to being at the end of his gun, with its intensity and narrowed-eye purpose. 

Matt had wanted to fuck him so badly. He wasn’t even sure what had stopped him. Whether it was that Mello didn’t deserve to fuck Matt, or that Matt didn’t deserve to fuck Mello. Maybe both.

He came imagining Mello kneeling in the shower before him. It took a long time to get out of the water, a tremendous effort to dial in the instructions to lift and walk to his feet, like phoning somebody on Mars, while the individual water drops thundered down on him like comets. Lumbering weak-kneed into the bedroom, he stepped over the paraphernalia crusted on the floor like coral on an island, and curled onto his mattress, back bared to the rotating tower fan, so that the air moving gently over his skin felt like Mello’s cool fingers in the warehouse.

He wanted to go back. He wanted to return to Wammy’s, when there were no debts between them. The skin of Mello’s cheek used to look like the skin of the crook of Matt’s elbow: unmarked by any history, untough, fit only for a lip to explore, shyly, on a truant afternoon.

Matt was haunted by the possibility that he could’ve done something different, said something to Mello to make him stay.

Maybe Mello would never have stayed.

Matt was angry at Mello; he was angry at himself, too. These thoughts were like two mirrors turned towards each other. They led nowhere, gave no answers.

He put his head under the pillow, and stared into the greasy cotton, searching for sleep.

()

The house was dark and silent when Matt returned for the second day of work. He kicked at the toolbox, sullen. Wouldn’t have gotten up so early if he knew Mello wouldn’t be here. He had brought an icebox, too, with too many sodas for just himself.

He worked steadily through the noon heat, hauling his sloshing icebox from room-to-room, cracking a Coke in each one and leaving the can behind to mark progress.

Halfway through his eighth soda in his eighth empty room, he was interrupted by the roar of a motorbike outside.

He peered out one (empty, non-glassed) window hole. Down in the yard, Mello was swinging a leg off the bike, detaching an arm from a waist. The boy straddling the bike leaned in, either whispering something to Mello or pecking him on the cheek; Matt couldn’t see from his angle, line of sight blocked by Mello’s glossy mop of hair, which he’d grown back out, after all.

Mello laughed, flipped the guy off as he rode away. Matt was struck with deja vu like lightning. The memory of a million dirty jokes muttered to Mello. The rolled eye that said  _ I’m better than that  _ and the curled lip that said he wasn’t.

“Matt.” His voice echoed up the stairwell. “Where are you?”

()

Afterwards, Mello insisted on getting dinner, even though Matt wasn’t hungry, and mainly wanted a shower. He went along, because he couldn’t figure out how to bring up the shower in a non-winking, eyebrow-waggling sort of way, like, “You know what sounds  _ nice _ right now...”

Mello directed them to a dumpy Chinese dive where the muscular air conditioning quickly froze Matt’s sweat-soaked shirt solid.

“It’s cold as shit in here.”

“It’s because you’re under the vent. Sit on this side.”

Mello didn’t trade places when Matt came over, so they were left sitting on the same side of the 4-person table, like they were job interviewers waiting for a candidate.

Matt was intensely aware of his underarm stink. He pictured it rising in wavy lines from his body, like in cartoons. Silently, he willed Mello to move. Mello stared placidly at the menu.

“I always hate it when…”

“Hm?”

Matt bit his tongue. “Nevermind.”

“When couples sit like this?” Mello said baldly. “I’m gonna get this. You know what you want?”

“Uh. Garlic noodles, I guess.”

Mello sat across from him when he came back to the table. He put Matt’s noodles on the table, put $500 on the table too.

“Dude,” hissed Matt, slapping a napkin over the wad of 20s.

“It’s fine. We own this place.”

“Okay, jesus. Gimme a head’s up.”

Hesitantly, he moved the napkin back off. Mello had never paid him so bluntly before. They had operated off an unspoken shared pool of money. Like a couple. Would Mello expect him to pay him back for the noodles? Would he expect him to pay him back for the months of food and electricity he’d consumed in the San Marino lockup, too? Or was that free, the way jail was free?

Mello’s chopsticks interrupted him. Swooping in to steal a piece of Matt’s pork topping. “It’s getting cold,” he said. “Put away your money, or somebody’ll steal it.”

After dinner, they stood outside. Matt shuffled from foot-to-foot; Mello stood still, smoking one of Matt’s cigarettes.

“So do you, like... need a ride?” Matt said.

“Where’re you going?”

“Home, I guess.”

Mello’s eyes raked over him like nails over scalp. Matt couldn’t meet them as he added lamely, “But I could drop you off somewhere.”

He might as well have told Mello to go fuck himself. “That’s alright,” Mello said neutrally. “That’s the wrong side of town from me.”

“Well. Okay.”

Matt got into his truck so damn slowly, looking over his shoulder so many times, thought Mello irritably. What did he expect Mello to do, claw his way into the passenger seat? Kiss his garlicky mouth, lick the grease from his lips?

He licked his own instead. “Matt,” he called, over the kick of the engine starting.

“Yeah.”

“There’s another job. Next week sometime.”

“Okay. Cool.”

“I’ll contact you. Same number.”

“Sure.”

“Great.”

“Call me,” Matt added faintly. It was nearly swallowed by the sound of the engine. Mello nodded into the headlights, squinting as they wiped across him and then away.

He vanished slowly in the dark glass of Matt’s rearview, the cherry of Matt’s cigarette waving at him like a firefly.


	6. El Segundo I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt looked at the sliding heaps of heroin baggies on his floor. No, shit wasn’t gonna work out.

[This guy died right in front of me today.]

[First time?]

Matt stared at the blinking cursor.

2018 had turned out to be an unprecedentedly bad year to be a criminal. Kira rampaged unstoppable. Ordinary people used pseudonyms and wore face masks. Matt favored one printed with yellow smiley faces. Gallows humor.

Even Mello had had to shift some of his focus from killing Kira to not getting killed by Kira. The entire world was playing defense. What the fuck was Near doing, wherever the fuck he was?

Numerous times, Matt had come close to suggesting that the two of them should work together. Near must have reached out to Mello already—so that only left that Mello, the stubborn, prideful fuck, had refused.

[First time], he wrote back. [Popped my Kira cherry.]

[Cheers.]

Maybe he should drop a hint. However it happened, Matt wanted it to be fucking done already. Kira had been doing numbers on cartels lately. The lines from Mexico were blown to fuck, and the price of a bundle must’ve gone up 3x since last year. The just, reformed world looked fucking bleak for men like Matt.

A ping; Mello had messaged him again.

[Who was it?]

The image of Matt’s dealer toppling over in the middle of his own apartment, facefirst into the stringy corn plant in the corner, while his girlfriend screamed in the corner. Christ, poor girl. He’d always claimed she was eighteen, but Matt hadn’t ever really believed him.

[Just some guy.]

()

At home, Yael’s girlfriends were over.

“Oh, it’s Matt. Hi, Matt.” “Hi, babe.” Much of honeyed voices, the waving of long nails.

He smiled uncomfortably. They wanted junk; he had none to give.

When Yael got home from her shift, he caught her by the arm, swung her into the bedroom and said, “So, uh, listen. Armen is dead.”

“Jesus.” She said this while reaching into Matt’s pocket to search for one of his cigarettes, looking not-too-shook-up at all. Yael was a tough girl. “Kira?”

“Guess he could’ve just had a heart attack.”

“Yeah, right. What’ll we do?”

She meant what would Matt do. Matt was the bad guy in the relationship. He’d started by selling to Yael, and then her friends, and then her friends’ friends. Like every time Matt had ended up dealing, he’d never intended to start—but it just so easy to make a profit, especially since Yael came from money, hung around rich kids who paid with their parents’ pocketbooks and didn’t give a fuck about Matt’s racketeer-level markups.

She answered for him: “Well, you know other people. You can ask around.”

“Whoever’s left, you mean.”

“Somebody’ll be left.”

She was right. There was always someone left willing to play the game. The players just got more desperate as the stakes got higher.

()

Just pulling up at Redd’s house made Matt nervous. As if Mello would be lurking around in the bushes, waiting to shout at him, he thought as he stepped out of his car. No, Mello couldn’t possibly care any longer what Matt did when he was off the job. They were in a state of don’t ask, don’t tell; Matt did the work that was asked, shot up between his toes, cleaned the gear off his table on the rare occasions Mello came around. Clean living.

Still, Matt had scrupulously avoided buying from members too firmly-enmeshed in the mob. Call it habit.

Redd’s side door was locked, so Matt knocked on the front. Redd was nearly unrecognizable when he opened the door, behind overgrown hair and a beard that pushed out from behind a blue surgical mask like weed smoke from behind a teenager’s car door.

“Jesus fucking christ, Matty, I nearly blew your red goddamn head off. It’s been about ten fuckin’ years, you little asshole.”

Matt raised a hand. “Yo, Redd.”

“Get the fuck inside. Quit fuckin’ lingering.”

()

Matt left the house heavy with Betty’s excellent lasagna and the feeling that he was fucked.

Redd, like everyone else in the city, was looking to lower his exposure by selling to as few people as possible. No more open garage, no more kitchen door. He had refused to deal Matt in the small quantities Matt wanted. It was go big, or go home.

It’d be easy to make a killing, he’d added, soto voice as Betty dished ice cream for dessert. Matt would be a fuckin’ millionaire in a year. Redd just couldn’t risk it. He had a family.

Matt looked at the two kilos of heroin in his trunk. A millionaire, or dead. Either way he’d get his happy ending.

()

Yael was very happy with him when he got home. They stayed up all night cutting and bundling the lot, and only took a break at three in the morning to sample the product and fuck on the kitchen table. She laughed like a hyena when the table broke, rolling on the floor among the plastic bags like a kid making snow angels.

Times with Yael were best when the drugs were rolling. Sober, they didn’t have much to talk about. But it wasn’t that kind of relationship anyway. Matt dealt to her, and she was nice to him. Shit was simple.

Matt scooped her up from where she’d fallen asleep on the floor, depositing her gently onto the mattress and closing the bedroom door to keep her snores in.

Mello never snored. He slept soundlessly, curled up like a little cat. It was always Matt lumbering around, stealing the blanket and kicking Mello in the shins with his night jolts. Maybe Mello used to close the door on Matt’s snores.

Matt had thought about leaving L.A. a few times, but Mello’s steady stream of jobs kept him loosely tethered. He felt free neither to leave nor to approach, and bobbed around at a steady distance, kept his hands politely to himself when he rode bitch on Mello’s motorbike, cracking jokes that were less raunchy then they used to be.

The apartment on Mariposa was so long ago. The sex felt like something Matt had made up in a fever dream. It might as well have been. Mello probably never took another drop of morphine after he healed up.

Matt looked at the sliding heaps of heroin baggies on his floor. No, shit wasn’t gonna work out.

His phone buzzed.

[Did N call you?]

What the fuck? Matt went out onto the porch and phoned Mello.

“Yeah.”

“Why would he call me?”

“I don’t know.” His sigh was a warm crackle in Matt’s ear, like somebody lighting a small fire. “Where does any goddamn idea in that creepy little head come from?”

“But like, he’s been phoning people up?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Did he call you?”

A pause.

“I think you should—”

“Let’s talk about anything else,” Mello said abruptly. “What’re you doing up so late?”

“This is like the middle of the day for me. What’d you say to him?”

“Is that why you’re always yawning when I see you?”

“I’m a night person, dude. You know.”

“I’m more of a morning person.”

“You’re twenty-four seven.” Matt was thinking of the game show they’d watched. There was no one else on earth he could win that show with, not even with a gun to his head. “Dude, don’t bite my head off, but if I were you I’d really think about working with him.”

When Mello said nothing, he added, “It’s been like eleven years already.”

“Nearly twelve,” Mello corrected. He probably knew to the second when L had died.

Matt nodded, pressing his forehead against the cold balcony railing. Soon they’d have lived half their lives under Kira’s thumb. How much longer could Mello evade the long finger of justice? How much longer could Matt?

“Why does there only have to be one L at a time, anyway? It’s a stupid rule.”

“There’s only one Kira.”

“Kira’s not working by themself.” Matt yawned. The sun was starting to bleach the horizon. Time for vampires to retreat. “I’d bet on it.”

Mello hummed in disagreement. He was probably convinced Kira worked alone because Mello worked alone. This, despite the fact that he’d clearly been working with Matt all this time. Together they counted as at least a person-and-a-half, Matt thought.

“You sound tired,” Mello said.

“A little.”

“Go to sleep, then.”

“Thought it’d be rude to just hang up. What’re you doing?”

“Staying up.”

“Fuck that. I’m going to sleep.”

But he didn’t hang up, just put his phone on speaker and dropped it on the patio table.

“Your phone’s still on,” came Mello’s tinny voice.

“I know. Just do your thing.”

Mello provided a nice white noise. Tapping a pen, rustling pages. The sound of his long nails drumming on the desk sounded like pebbles turning under a wave. Matt’s back shivered pleasantly, remembering how they’d felt on his skin.

Reclining his patio chair all the way back, Matt mumbled, “Night, dude.”

“Good night, Matt.”

()

The end of the year approached, with its hurdle of lonely holidays. The Wammy’s disease hung in the air like the seasonal flu: the nihilism and vague suicidal thoughts, dreams of jumping off roofs, or mixing your aspirin and alcohol. To be fair, this probably wasn’t unique to Wammy’s. Christmas in any orphanage anywhere was bound to be a pretty miserable affair.

Matt coped by staying continuously high, like running a drug ultramarathon. He saw very little of Mello.

On the day of L’s and Watari’s deaths, Matt texted Mello some stupid meme of a gecko smoking a blunt. He mainly wanted to check that he hadn’t killed himself; he didn’t think Mello was Catholic enough for fear of damnation to be much of a deterrent anymore.

Nine hours later, Mello texted back, [What?]

Matt smiled, content. [You know], he responded.

Matt spent Thanksgiving alone. He spent Christmas alone, too, since Yael had gone home to her family on the east coast, taking a good quantity of Matt’s dope with her, because she “wouldn’t survive” them otherwise. Yael’s family was as dysfunctional as shit. Matt was glad she hadn’t invited him along. They’d have shattered all his fantasies about relationships and family for good.

At just past midnight of Christmas eve, Mello texted him: [Merry Christmas].

Matt missed it. The text buzzed in his jeans pocket as he drove to Redd’s house for his fortnightly pickup. Having spent most of the past week talking to no one, living on his 24-hour-awake / 12-hour-asleep schedule, he’d quickly gotten out of sync with the world, and only realized what day it was when he saw the kids pillow-fighting in their pajamas through the picture window, the cookies and milk laid out by the tree, and the presents glistening in the cloud of fake snow.

In the kitchen, Redd and his wife had given up on controlling their children, and were slow-dancing in a cloud of empty wine glasses. Dude needed to get some curtains. It wasn’t safe to be exposed like this.

Matt reached for his phone. Mello’s message had already been buried by an avalanche of people looking for hookups. He’d have to come back to Redd’s tomorrow.

It was only after he’d driven home, shot up, nodded out, got woken up by a different text, and silenced his phone in annoyance, that he read Mello’s message.

[I felt like such an orphan just now], he wrote back. [And happy christmas, dude.]

His response came instantaneously: [What does that mean?]

[Nothing. Just creeping on other people’s families.]

[Sounds sketchy and pathetic.]

[Maybe :( What’re you up so late for?]

[Working. You?]

[I was having a nap.]

There was a pause long enough that Matt started to drift back off. He was startled back awake by his phone vibrating violently on the bare skin of his chest: [Are you going back to sleep?]

[Eh], Matt wrote back, stifling a yawn. [I’m pretty awake.]

[I could use a break.]


	7. El Segundo II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What if I did get married?”  
> “What about it?”  
> “Would we have to stop being friends?”

Mello was waiting outside, his skin painted electric blue by the taqueria’s neon sign. It was chilly out at this time of night, but he wore only the usual leather vest and driver’s gloves. Maybe he’d trained himself not to feel the cold.

He took his gloves off before he ate, to avoid the taco drippings. Matt found himself distracted by a single bead of limey juice running down Mello’s left forearm.

“It’s good, right?” he prompted.

“It’s stoner food.”

“Yeah, so like, fucking amazing.”

“Good food for a smoker.”

“Whatever. I’m sorry you’re too weak to handle spicy things.” It was true that Matt’s sense of taste had been nuked by years of smoking. He tended to enjoy vinegar-blasted pickles and Doritos, things like that.

“You look like a stoner,” Mello added, nodding at Matt’s oversized hoodie and fuzzy sweatpants.

“I’m very comfortable. You look uncomfortable. Kinda like a stripper.”

“Like usual, then,” Mello said so seriously that Matt laughed.

He couldn’t stop grinning like an idiot as they chatted, and had to keep hiding his smile in his sleeve. He was definitely still a little high, but also, he had missed shooting the shit with Mello. One of Matt’s biggest flaws was how bad he was at holding onto a grudge. Anger leaked and dripped easily through the heart-cracks, leaving behind only gunked-on nostalgia, fond memories. After Mello laughed at two of his bad jokes, Matt found that he’d mostly forgiven him, and after he’d laughed at three, he was halfway back in love.

Mello nodded at the table. “You got a text.”

Matt glanced at his phone. On the screen, Yael’s perky left tit flashed the world from what was presumably the bathroom of her childhood home.

“Ah, shit—”

He snatched the phone towards him, scrambling to turn off his alerts. Fuck, anyone could’ve messaged him, looking for anything.

From an unknown number, a few hours ago: [Hi Matt. This is Tiffany. My dad let me have a phone for Christmas. This is my first one. Pretty cool! Anyway, Merry Christmas.]

“Your friend’s dad let her have a phone for the first time?”

Mello’s ability to read at the same speed upside-down as rightside-up was annoying. “No, that’s not—different person,” Matt muttered, typing out a quick [Merry Christmas :)]. Christ, he was going to block her, for her own good. “Tiffany’s just some kid.”

“Why is a kid texting you?”

“I dunno, I think she has a crush on me or something.”

“Hm. Do you need a minute?”

“Huh?”

“Well, your grown-up friend probably expects an answer too.”

Matt flushed. “Whatever. Like you’ve never done it.”

“Mm-hm.”

“...really?”

“Yeah.”

“Like you send—pictures to people?”

“I don’t know why you’re so shocked.”

“Well, I did once spend two months wiping photos of you off the internet.”

“My face isn’t in these photos, Matt.”

Matt could neither look Mello in the face nor look down, so he settled for staring fixedly over Mello’s shoulder. He wished Mello would close his legs a little more when he sat, like, ever, instead of presenting his crotch to the world like a challenge.

It was easy to imagine Mello pressuring someone into sending photos of themself. At Wammy’s he had used to make Matt jerk off to him.

At the time, Matt had been awed by Mello’s confident sexuality. What other sixteen-year-old on earth knew they were into that shit? Could demand that their maniacal egotism and tastes in voyeurism be fulfilled, when Matt could not even demand a correction to his lunch order at the local chippy counter?

Laid out flat on his back on Mello’s bunk, Matt would watch helplessly as Mello straddled his lap, pulling Matt’s holey t-shirt off as assertively as shucking corn. Every time, Matt’s arms rose instinctively to cross over his cold, skinny chest, and every time Mello reached down and unfolded them for him.

“Gross.”

“Rude, dude. Don’t call me gross.”

“It’s gross how wet you are. Like a girl.”

“Please don’t make fun of me, seriously.”

Mello took pity and reached down to rub Matt’s balls for him. “Don’t go too fast,” he demanded. As if Matt had any say over it, at that age. Mello probably enjoyed how quickly he came. Sometimes it happened without warning, so that Matt couldn’t get the tissue in time, and Mello’s sheets paid the price instead. Yeah. Mello always liked Matt to be a little pathetic.

In retrospect, Mello had fucking cheated him. He’d cowed Matt so thoroughly that Matt had never thought to ask him to repay the favor. Matt bet he’d have come just as fucking quickly. Behind his cool little mask, he was horny as anybody. Holding this secret in his pocket felt good, like being armed with a pocketknife.

“So what’s the deal?” he said to Mello. They were standing outside in the parking lot, having been squeezed out of the restaurant by a crowd of college kids—probably escaping from their parents. The sound of them yelling about shots spilled out the kitchen back door in a cloud of yellow light.

“With what?”

“The photos. You make people pay or what?”

“Fuck off, Jeevas.”

“What? What is it, like five dollars or something?”

“I think it’d be a little more than five dollars.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. What’re you offering?”

“I don’t know,” echoed Matt.

Mello flicked aside his cigarette half-finished, and took a stick of gum out of his pocket instead. “Who was that girl?” he asked.

“She’s Yael.”

“I don’t need to know her name, Matt. Are you dating her?”

“Sorta, I guess. Yeah.”

“That’s nice. Are you going to get married?”

“Jesus, is that the bar?”

“The bar to what?”

Mello fucking knew. He was standing very close to Matt by now.

Matt laughed a little when Mello hooked a thumb in his belt loops, allowing himself to be shuffled forwards.

“No, man, come on.”

“Tell me if you want me to leave you alone.”

“I want you to leave me alone,” Matt whispered, but his left hand had risen to pet Mello’s hair, fingers threading through the strands, tugging gently here and there.

“Don’t yank on it.”

“Uh-huh. I like your long hair better.”

“Thank you. So do I.” Matt’s finger tickled the sensitive spot on his nape. “You’re being very confusing right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mello lost patience. Like so many times before, he made his mind up for him, pushing at him until he had him up against the side of Matt’s car, and then reaching around him to open the door so they could fall in.

A few minutes passed in blissful silence.

“Mel,” Matt panted into the side of Mello’s face. Mello had been snacking on his ear, tonguing Matt’s earring until it was obscenely glossy wet.

“Yeah.”

“What if I did get married?”

“What about it?”

“Would… like, would we have to stop being friends?”

Jesus christ. “Well, we couldn’t be friends like this,” Mello pointed out.

“Yeah, okay. That make sense.”

In the dark, Mello closed his eyes. He was very frustrated with Matt’s mixed signals, his two-steps-forward, one-step-back. He had spelled out his intentions as clearly as he could; he was at his fucking limit.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?”

“When you say things like that.”

“Like what?” Matt sounded bewildered. “No, I don’t mean anything.”

He was sensing, slowly, that he’d fucked it up. Hesitantly he guided Mello’s hands back towards his belt and Mello pulled away. Then they were both sitting up.

Matt’s messy hair silhouetted against the window like a storm-ruffled palm tree. “Dude,” he whispered, “like... what just happened?”

He sounded so helpless and hurt. As if Mello was the one who’d thrown around talk of marrying. Of being just friends.

Mello wished he had the answers for him. But all he could say was, “I don’t know. You tell me.”

()

Ten minutes past midnight on New Year’s Eve. Mello was awake, of course; alone, of course.

When his phone rang and he saw Matt’s number, he nearly didn’t pick up. Still smarting from their encounter last week, he’d figured Matt could use a little bit of cold shoulder.

After it was all over, Mello was struck by how easily he could’ve stuck by his decision. Things might have turned out very differently for a number of people if he had—not just Matt and Mello, but Near, the SPK, and yes, Light Yagami, whose name at that point Mello did not even know.

The question of what happened in the universe where Matt’s call went unanswered was something a different man could’ve spent a lifetime pondering.

But Mello didn’t look back. He hit the answer button.

“Yeah, Matt.”

“Hey, dude.”

Those were the only two words Matt said, but Mello asked immediately, “What’s wrong?” Tipped off by a variety of subtle cues: the slight breathlessness of Matt’s voice, the hitch between words, and fading quickly into the background, the wail of a siren.

“You know Dogtooth, right?”

Dogtooth was a nightclub over in West Hollywood. What the fuck was Matt doing there? “Sure.”

“I need you to come there.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

()

By the time Mello arrived, the club was lit up and cordoned off. Girls teetered out in heels, sitting dejectedly on the curb to call their Ubers. A single police cruiser was parked outside, splashing red-and-blue light over the entrance like a silent disco.

Still sitting in his car, he called their dispatcher, a nice grad student named Molly Rooney.

“Hey, Mello.”

“Molly. Was there an ambulance leaving from Dogtooth in Hollywood? Would’ve been the last thirty, forty minutes.”

“One second.” He listened to her nails tapping on the keyboard. “Yeah. 12:03. Gunshot.”

Jesus fuck, Matt. “Where’s it gone? Cedars Sinai?”

“Looks like it. You want me to head them off?”

“Go ahead.”

“Parking preference?” She meant where should she send the body, after they’d intercepted it.

“Anywhere’s fine. You can use Country Club.”

“Good night, Mello.”

He hung up. Molly wouldn’t mind; she was professional. Mello quite liked her.

Nobody paid him much mind as he stepped under the police tape. Probably took him for one of the clubbers. It didn’t take him long to locate the cops. There were two of them, crowded into a small side room with four or five kids. There was a lot of shouting. One of the partiers was sitting on the floor, sobbing hysterically.

“—jesus, just give her some space, alright? Can you give her some space? She’s fucking tripping out—”

“Yvette, you bitch. Stop crying.”

Mello recognized the owner of this sardonic voice. What had Matt said her name was? Yael?

He stepped into the room and waited to be noticed.

When the police and everyone had turned to stare, and the only sound in the room was the whimpering of the girl on the floor, he said quietly, “Okay, everyone, let’s calm down.”

()

Matt’s needed to haul ass to Redd’s. Buy him out, get the fuck out of town.

But his arm hurt like a bitch. And it wasn’t like Matt knew a whole lot of back-alley doctors in other states. He touched it gingerly. Nope, that wasn’t going to be something Tylenol could paper over.

Dialing Gorman with his right hand was difficult. His fingers were stiff with cold; he hadn’t exactly stopped to grab his jacket on the way out of the club.

“Matt, man. How’s it going?”

_I’m calling you, dude, how do you think?_

Matt fumbled for his wallet, thumbing through 20s and loose change. He wanted to make sure he had enough left over for Redd.

“Hey, man,” he mumbled. “You have time right now?”

()

Visiting Gorman wasted two perfectly good hours, since of course he lived on the opposite fucking side of town, and of course there was traffic at one in the fucking morning, courtesy of various drunk-driving crashes. All told, it was nearly 3 by the time Matt made it to El Segundo.

A mile away from the house, Matt was already sweating and scanning every parked car, looking for Mello’s license plate.

A couple blocks before the house, his brain finally kicked into gear. He pulled over and dug out the text from Tiffany.

[Hey Tiffany, you up?]

The answer came within twenty seconds; the kid must’ve set up a goddamn alert or something.

[Hi!!]

[Hi :) Can I call you for a second?]

His phone rang immediately.

“Hi, Matt. It’s so late.”

“Yeah, it’s really late. I’m sorry.” He waited for her to work her way through a yawn. “Listen, though, I have kind of a weird question. Are you at home right now?”

“Yeah?”

“Is all of your family home, too?”

“I mean, I think so.”

This was good news. If Mello had made any sort of threat towards Redd, Redd would’ve tried to get his family out first thing.

“Are you coming over?” piped the small voice over the line.

“I might be.”

“Knock three times on the door,” she said assertively. “I’ll come unlock it for you.”

()

Matt approached the house with his gun raised. Better safe than sorry. It was too bad that the kid would have to see it, but considering the amount of addicts that had trickled through Redd’s place, he doubted it’d have been the first piece she’d seen.

The yellow porch light rested on Matt’s shoulders like a spotlight as he hurried up the stairs and rapped on the door.

Footsteps thudded down the hallway.

“Tiffany?”

“Matt?”

He breathed out, lowering the gun. The door creaked open.

“Hey—”

The kid scampered backwards from the entrance. Twisting a handful of her pajama t-shirt, she said solemnly, “I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“Hi.”

Matt froze. In the dark of the foyer, the barrel of Mello’s Sig Sauer winked at him.

To discourage him from bolting, Mello shifted the sight an inch, shot out the porch light, the transom window, and the bannister near Matt’s hand.

“Fuck!”

“Get the fuck—”

Mello twisted him inside by the ear, mostly heedless of Matt’s bad arm.

“Hold, ow, hold on a sec—”

In the living room, Redd and company sat in a neat line on the couch, hands cuffed behind their backs.

“Jesus christ, Matty.”

“I am so sorry about this.”

“You couldn’t have dropped a hint you were fuckin’ fuckin’ _Mello?_ Never thought that was relevant fuckin’ intel?”

“Matt’s _gay?”_

“I like girls too,” he reassured Tiffany. “Like I guess I’m bisexual, technically.”

“Are we having a goddamn conference?” said Mello, incredulously. He was still holding Matt by the ear, like a teacup handle.

The barrel of Mello’s gun pushed Matt into the bathroom. 

“Mel, listen, please just—please don’t fuck with them. It’s my fault. Okay? Please don’t do anything.”

The Sig Sauer stamped his forehead. “What I do is none of your goddamn business.”

“Okay, yeah.”

“You were skimming off my fucking morphine?”

“I—that was—”

Mello slammed the door shut. “Get on the floor. I’ll deal with you later.”

Matt lowered himself uncertainly to the ground. The bathroom carpet was unpleasant at close range, toenail clippings looming like glaciers.

He could barely hear over the pounding of his heart. Wouldn’t that be ironic, if Matt ate it of a heart attack on the scuzzy floor of Redd’s bathroom.

No further sound came from outside. His pulse cooled. Gingerly, he pushed himself onto his knees.

“Mel?”

When he tried the door, the handle clicked and stalled. There was something jammed underneath. A second later, several bullets came tearing through the drywall, shattering the mirror and tearing a smoking hole through the shower curtain.

“Motherfucker!”

Glass chipped his arm. He really could’ve shot him. Like fish in a fucking barrel. Matt got back down on the floor.

After some period of time long enough for his broken arm to start aching beneath him, Matt heard the front door thud shut, and then Mello’s boots stomping over.

“You alive in there?”

“Yeah,” said Matt resentfully. “Can I sit up? Like, can you not start shooting again?”

Mello didn’t respond. Warily, Matt sat up and shuffled against the door. His arm really hurt. He should’ve laid down on his back.

“Can we talk, dude? Please?

“Mel?

“You there?”


	8. Mar Vista I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maybe the tender, dreamy boy he’d known only existed in Mello’s imagination.

Matt was much easier to manage after his second withdrawal. He didn’t try to escape or attack Mello or anything, and mostly spent twenty-four hours a day in bed, playing dead.

This was convenient for the first week, after which it started to worry a little.

Mello phoned Gorman up for a half-dozen prescriptions of SSRIs. The irony was not lost on him. Earlier he’d swung by Matt’s place, kicked down the door to the dragon’s hoard of drug crap: old blood in the tile grout, vomit under the toilet seat. The medicine cabinet contained nothing but expired multivitamins and children’s Band-Aids. If Matt had ever been on medication in his adult life, he wasn’t taking it now.

At home, he was an unmoving thistle of bedhead under Mello’s expensive percale blankets, which Mello himself was getting zero use out of ever since he’d moved Matt into his house, since he apparently couldn’t stand to be touched anymore. More than once, Mello had considered moving all the nice bed linen out to the couch where he slept. He doubted that Matt would notice whether he was under percale or polyester, or sand, or the sea.

Coming around the side of the bed, he dumped the bottles onto the nightstand.

“I got some stuff.”

No response.

“Tell me which ones you take.”

Not a sound.

“Matt.” No way he was asleep. Mello touched a padded lump that might’ve been a shoulder. Matt shifted like a salted slug.

Mello sighed. “Get up. These take time to fill. You need to tell me so I can get the prescriptions.”

“Fuck off.”

“Quit hiding. You’ve been in there all day.”

“I’m not taking anything.”

Mello tore the blankets off. “I’ll burn this goddamn bed down—” he started, before he was startled into silence by the brilliant red caked all over Matt’s fingers.

“I had a nosebleed,” Matt said sullenly.

There was blood sunk like a well into Mello’s down pillows, spattered on the imported Moroccan sheets. It was smudged on Matt’s cast and had run all the way down to his belly button, exposed underneath the same rucked-up t-shirt he’d been wearing for the past five days.

“Jesus fucking christ! Don’t pick your fucking nose, goddamnit!”

“I didn’t _pick_ it.”

He yanked Matt’s good arm out from under his side, ran his fingers up the pale skin.

“Dude, don’t be stupid,” whispered Matt. “What would I even cut myself with? Like I can’t even barely be bothered to go to the bathroom to take a piss.”

“I don’t know what you can or can’t be motivated to do.”

“It just happened, like, randomly,” Matt defended, as Mello forced the shirt over his head to check his torso. “It just started.”

Mello barely hesitated before shoving his boxers down.

“Leave me alone. Fucking _leave_ me alone.”

It was easy to push his protesting hand away. He was as weak as a child, moved as slowly as a lagging dial-up connection. Mello had run out of patience with Matt’s secrets. He hadn’t known about Matt’s junkie mother until he’d broken into Wammy’s system and read his file. He hadn’t known about the overdoses, hadn’t expected to find Matt living out of a car ten years after he’d left him, either.

The way Matt had looked when they picked him up had scared him. Fucking Matt probably didn’t even remember how he hadn’t recognized Mello during that first withdrawal; the way he’d flinched and crawled away from him whenever Mello came to check on him, eyes tracking the barrel of Mello’s gun. And the sound of his pleading, christ.

“Please, oh fuck, oh my god... I’m gonna, I’m gonna fucking die, holy shit.”

“Are you drinking?”

“I can’t, I can’t—”

“You need to drink.”

He tried to hold a water bottle to Matt’s lips, but Matt sputtered and whined, turning his head away and coughing. The whites of his rolling eyes had turned a weird yellow, like nicotine-stained wallpaper.

Mello’s chest ratcheted with stress. His trigger finger twitched unconsciously and Matt twitched with it. He forced himself to take a couple of deep breaths: in through the nose, out through the mouth.

“Do you want an IV?”

Finally, Matt seemed soothed by the sight of the bag and long needle. Quieting, he let Mello slip the tube into the back of his hand without protest.

“Don’t pull it out,” he said to him as he taped it down.

“Okay.”

“You pulled it out last time.”

“M’sorry.”

“Don’t pull these out, either.” Mello brushed the mass of white pads and wires taped to Matt’s bony chest. They were for monitoring his heart rate.

He’d never known fear in his life like the moment Matt had somehow clawed away the sensors and he’d woken up to an alarm blaring that he’d flat-lined. He’d been all for tying Matt’s arms behind his back, then, and had only been dissuaded by the attendant doctor telling him he risked choking to death on his own vomit if he couldn’t move himself around.

Matt’s discomfort and fear and pain, Mello could tolerate. He would not tolerate him dying.

Now, confronted with Matt’s bloody chin and throat, Mello tugged his ratty underwear the rest of the way off. His naked body looked fragile under the weight of the morning sunshine, like some ancient artifact that might crumble if you breathed on it, or looked at it the wrong way.

“You need to change. You’ve been wearing the same clothes for a week.”

“Fuck you. Why didn’t you stop?”

“Because you were hiding and fucking bleeding and I thought you might’ve hurt yourself.”

“I said I didn’t.”

“You said you were sober, too.”

Matt shifted his good arm over his face. “I fucking _told_ you I just had a fucking nosebleed,” he said, voice flat and thick. “You should’ve stopped.”

Mello paused in the middle of tugging one of the pillowcases off. He realized Matt was about to cry.

Stiffly, he bent to gather up the blankets from the floor where he’d thrown them. They were voluminous, heavy as fuck. Matt was going to get crushed under them, if he kept lying there. He didn’t understand how to explain this kindly.

“I’m just going to wash these, and then you can have them back.”

“Okay.”

“They’ll feel better if they’re clean.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

It did, obviously. Mello slipped out of the room to fetch a wet towel and fresh set of clothes for Matt: underwear, an old t-shirt, and one of Mello’s, too, if he cared for that. He put them next to Matt’s turned back before going downstairs to the laundry room, where he stared at the spin cycle through the door until he felt dizzy.

In the hour and a half it took for the laundry to finish running, Matt had only managed to drape the shirts over his torso and hips. The towel was soaking into the mattress, untouched. Crusts of blood blackened around both nostrils.

Mello sighed, irritated. “Clean your face off. I’m not going to fucking do it for you.”

But Matt didn’t move, even when Mello flicked his shoulder. Really asleep, then. This was rare, for all the time he spent in bed. He hardly ever slept when he got like this.

Matt’s puffing breath sounded the same as it had from their dorm’s upper bed. The wheezy nose-whistle on the exhale that had irritated Mello for so many sleepless nights. He could tell when Matt was faking being asleep, because he didn’t make that noise. It was odd knowing something about him that he didn’t know about himself.

He let himself sit on the edge of the mattress, holding the warm back of Matt’s neck like a bicycle handle. Just five minutes, he thought, tracing a finger down his back.

The skin there was so pale that his scars blended in, like dust on a white table. He had plenty; nothing like Mello’s, obviously, but various scrapes and scabs. A crooked nose, a ring finger that wouldn’t quite straighten. Of course the injection scars between his long toes. The most obvious was an old stab wound puckering up the back of his right shoulder. From what? A drug deal gone wrong? How could a boy like Matt even get stabbed? Matt, who could barely make eye contact when he talked to you, and held his gun like he’d never shot it.

But he had, of course. Mello’s people had had to deal with the corpse with the exploded throat, from where Matt’s bullets had torn through the trachea and the ruined plate of the chin. Matt had drowned a man in his own blood. He had shot a guy over short change. He had dealt drugs in every city he’d ever lived in; Winchester, London, Phoenix. Los Angeles, under Mello’s goddamn nose. L.A. in the age of Kira. Mello couldn’t even think about it.

Looking back, he was nearly certain that Matt had used back at Wammy’s, too. Like the time Mello had been laying in bed scheming when Matt stumbled in and collapsed on top of him like he wasn’t even there.

“What the fuck!”

“Oh, hey Mel. Didn’t see ya.”

“Get the fuck off of me.” Matt was rolling aimlessly around on top of him like Mello was a yoga mat, crushing all the air out of him. “Move your fucking—”

Finally, he managed to corral the spaghetti limbs and bloated pupils against the wall. “Are you fucking drunk again?”

“Yeah-hh,” Matt laughed. Obviously. He was sweating alcohol, and his breath reeked of something peachy and cheap. “Dude, holy shit, like, I think I’m really wasted...”

Mello was livid. L had died three weeks ago; it wasn’t the time to be downing vodka under the bleachers or wherever, which was all Matt had been doing for the past week. Mello wanted to ask where Matt got off being so fucked up about things, anyway. He wasn’t even close to L. He wasn’t even number two.

As coldly as he could, he said, “You can sleep here.”

“Nice, thanks.”

“You’ll probably just fucking kill yourself trying to get up the ladder.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

But he snatched at Mello’s hand as soon as he got up: “No, don’t go. Why’re you leaving?”

“I’m going to fucking sleep.”

“Sleep down here.”

“No. I don’t want to deal with your shit.”

“Are you mad? Don’t be mad.”

“I’m—”

Mello slapped away the hot, damp fingers, his throat swelling with unspeakable thoughts. What he couldn’t tell Matt was that he was going to be leaving Wammy’s, very soon. He had decided this right after the news about L. It was the only option.

The plan was to leave Matt behind, too, of course, along with all the childish things. But Mello had been losing sleep, nightmaring and nail-biting; his stomach hurt constantly, and sometimes, when he looked at Matt’s sleeping face, his chest panged over his heart. The fact was that if Matt had stayed cool and competent, told Mello to fuck off with a grin and a wave, Mello might very well have caved at the gates, turned back and asked him to come with. But instead here he was, flopped out on Mello’s mattress, sticky, smashed. Rotting with some sadness Mello couldn’t fix.

This was what Mello was angry at: the indecency of Matt spilling his problems everywhere. The way they pooled on the floor, reflecting Mello’s helplessness back at him.

Mello didn’t know how to explain any of this; instead, he spat, “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with you? You’re always fucking falling apart over nothing.”

“I don’t know.”

“ _I don’t know._ You never know anything.”

“I’m sorry. I just, like, I feel bad sometimes...”

“You don’t even have anything to feel bad about.”

A tear crushed out of Matt’s eye. “Yeah, I do. I feel bad that you’re mad at me.”

Mello closed his eyes when he felt Matt’s lips brush his palm, then close around the tip of his finger.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No, Matt.”

“I wanna suck your dick.”

“You’re not even awake.”

“I am awake.” Matt pulled at his arm like reeling in a fishing line. “It’ll feel good.” He had his hands under his shirt already. Hunched over like praying, his forehead wiping sweat against Mello’s stomach while his fruity breath ghosted over the damp, spreading spot in Mello’s boxers. “Please.”

He’d let Matt do it, of course, and it made him feel as good and as dirty and used as he’d expected. And then he’d gone to sleep in the upper bunk anyway, his skin smarting with loneliness, thinking _good,_ because this was the way it was going to be from now on.

He left three days later, and by the time it occurred to him that Matt didn’t usually like drinking, that he’d never acted like that while drunk before, and that maybe the alcohol had been covering something else up, he was six months and five thousand miles too late to do anything about it.

The scariest thing, Mello thought, might be how easy it was to lose ten years, like a penny down a drain. And how much people could change, while the radio played mostly the same songs and you stood the same height as you’d always been.

Maybe the tender, dreamy boy he’d known only existed in Mello’s imagination in the first place. Matt’s body was as stepped-on as anyone’s. There were crows-feet coming in at the corner of his eyes, just like Mello’s, and water lingered on his dry cheek.

Mello swiped the drops off with his thumb—gently, so not to wake him. He’d let him rest for a while, he thought. The messy nose wasn’t hurting him anymore, anyway. The blood had already dried up and stopped.


	9. Mar Vista II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mello’s hand might be for shooting, his arm for hitting and his leg for kicking, but the inside of his lip was for Matt and Matt alone.

The days went on.

()

Matt unstuck from his perpetual waking coma at four in the morning. His mouth was dry, and his veins itched. Cigarettes wouldn’t do.

He hurried on jeans and sweatshirt and a pair of socks for the first time in weeks, surfing the headrush that bit at the edges of his vision. Carefully, he tiptoed out to the living room, where he was confronted by Mello sitting with his legs and his gun and his cool stare in the blue flicker of the television.

“Yes?” said Mello.

Matt went back to bed.

()

The next day, when he had observed several hours of uninterrupted silence in the house, he tried the door.

Locked, from the outside.

When Mello got home, he was forced to shove and boot the door open against the dead weight of Matt’s prone body, curled up on the welcome mat on the other side. He had to shimmy in through the frame, stepping carefully over the tangle of Matt’s legs so he didn’t trip.

He settled the takeout on the counter before coming back around to crouch by him.

“Get up.”

When Matt didn’t move, Mello took a handful of his hair and lifted his face clear of the floorboard for him. His hair felt like sticks.

“Look at me.”

Matt ignored him, so Mello slapped the floor next to his ear. He watched his eyes startle open. The way his pupils flinched from the light, accustomed to the shelter of drawn, shut eyelids.

“I’m only going to say this once,” he told him. “Don’t fuck with me.”

Matt looked at him with what was nearly strong enough to be hate. That was fine. Mello could deal.

“Now get up,” he repeated. “I’ve got dinner.”

()

Mello forgot mercy and patience.

Impatient hands jostled Matt awake. Mello’s layered rings dug into the sleep-swollen, sensitive knobs of his spine.

“What’re you—”

Mello grunted as he swung him over his shoulder.

“What the fuck,” Matt whispered, from somewhere in the vicinity of Mello’s right hip. His face was turning beet red from the blood draining down his neck, and his head spun from so much motion after so many weeks of stillness.

Patting him on the butt, Mello said, “Calm down, I’m not gonna drop you.”

He carried Matt all the way down the stairs, around into the garage, and heaved him down onto the passenger seat of the Camaro. “Sit there,” he ordered. “You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to get out of the car. Just sit.”

Matt sat, doing a perfect imitation of a houseplant or a piece of furniture. He didn’t comment on Mello’s pre-programmed radio favorites, or his habit of tailing drivers who were going too slow. Mello cracked the window slightly and watched the wind move Matt’s hair around. He hoped the sun would put some freckles back on his face. He missed those.

Whenever he parked, he took the keys and left Matt in the car with the windows down. On the fourth stop, he came back to the car and found Matt had relocated to the driver’s side.

Mello slid into the passenger seat. “You know how to get to Malibu, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Alright.”

Matt pulled them onto the freeway. He changed the radio to some EDM station. After ten minutes of thumping, rhythmic bass, he said suddenly, “Don’t tailgate people.”

“I don’t tailgate.”

“It just freaks people out, and then they go even slower. Just go around them.”

Matt drove like a maniac, weaving through traffic at 90 an hour like a skier doing a slalom run.

“This isn’t any safer,” Mello pointed out.

“It’s safer if you’re hella skilled like me.”

“I don’t fucking feel safe.”

“Sounds like a personal problem.”

“What the fuck kind of music is this, anyway?”

“Sorry, did you want to go back to listening to NPR? Like you’re a hundred fucking years old?”

Mello closed his eyes, resting the side of his head against the window. He’d missed this. He was always the one driving, always in control. It was a good break to have Matt steer them around for a change.

As soon as they got back to the house on Mariposa, Matt sloped off into the bedroom, which Mello was fine with. He’d made enough effort for the day.

Standing in the bedroom doorway, he watched Matt kick and pull at the increasingly tangled sheets. Matt had this frustrating habit of lying down on top of the blankets, and then when he decided he wanted to be underneath them instead, trying to move them without getting up. Starfished on the bed, he’d struggle for five or ten minutes to shift the blankets out from under himself, instead of sitting up for two seconds and pulling them out.

It was irritating watching him. Mello went over to the bed. “Move your arm. Other arm. Lift your ass up.” He yanked the knotted mass of warm sheets out from under Matt’s body, untangled them, and settled them in flat layers over him.

“You’re the best,” mumbled Matt, without irony or sarcasm. Sometimes Mello forgot how easy he was to please.

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Do I have to carry you down the stairs again tomorrow?”

Matt shrugged. “I can be part of your workout. Anyway I’m only going out if you let me drive the Camaro. I didn’t know you had a Camaro.”

“I have a few cars.” You can have the damn Camaro, Mello thought. Only one of us cares about cars.

()

“—Matt?”

Matt woke instinctively at the sound of his name. The sound of Mello talking out on the balcony trickled in through the window, which he had insisted on cracking open to loosen the foggy chokehold of Matt’s unvented cigarette smoke.

“Don’t you _fucking_ ask me about Matt.”

Matt stumbled dizzily to his feet. Pressing his cheek against the window screen allowed him to see the cherry of Mello’s cigarette darting violently back-and-forth in time with his gestures, like a firefly having a fit. Although he could only hear Mello intermittently over the sound of the freeway, he was obviously in full-blown chew-out mode—strained neck, spit, and all. Mello looked imminently uncool when he was pissed, a fact that was obvious as soon as you got over your fear in the face of it. This was especially unfortunate when dealing with Near, whose BPM had probably never gone above 60 in his life. He was like Buddha without a conscience.

Matt didn’t particularly mind being asked after by Near. Then again, he’d never particularly minded Near. That was all Mello. He watched him hurl his still-lit cigarette over the railing. Fucking irresponsible. Like L.A. needed more wildfires.

There was a long silence, during which Mello gripped the railing like he was trying to throttle it, and Matt peered into the darkness where the cigarette had fallen, waiting to see if the yard would catch fire.

Nothing. Maybe it’d hit the pool.

Finally, he heard Mello say faintly, “Because this needs to be over.”

Matt smiled, satisfied, and slid back into bed. “About fucking time,” he muttered into the pillow, and left the words there in the dark, since Mello would probably kill him if he ever told him so.

()

After that, Matt figured he had to make an effort. If Mello could pull his head out of his ass for long enough to work with Near, Matt could at least brush his teeth, or shower once in a while.

He actually scared Mello the first time he arrived home and found Matt slumped at the kitchen table. Matt didn’t even flinch at the appearance of the Sig Sauer. His heartbeat didn’t raise for shit when he got like this.

Raising both hands, he said, “Hey.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Heroin.” Mello’s face was thunderous. “I’m just kidding. I wanted some cereal.”

Matt moved like a haunted doll. You never saw him walking around, but would instead discover him lying around a new part of the house every couple hours.

Sometimes he’d be propped up by a bookcase, or scrunched up in front of the washing machine, and sometimes you’d find him lying facedown on the floor of the bathroom.

Mello cleared his throat. The back of Matt’s jumper rustled slightly in acknowledgement.

“What’s up?”

“Hey. I was gonna take a shower.”

“And what, got tired on the way?”

Matt shrugged. One pale shoulder sliding along the bathroom tile.

“Are you taking the meds?”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“You need to take the meds.”

“They make me feel like shit.”

“They make you function,” said Mello shortly. Matt was heavy as wet laundry when Mello hauled him up by the arm. Together, they looked at Matt’s leg, which he was having difficulty raising the foot-and-a-half necessary to bring him into the bathtub. “I guess,” whispered Matt.

Mello took pity. He ran him a bath, checking the temperature with the back of his hand, and stayed after the tap was shut so Matt wouldn’t be tempted to drown himself.

“It’s Matt soup,” said Matt.

“Sorry?”

He gestured at himself. “Matt soup.”

“Okay, you fucking weirdo.”

Matt’s hair was greasy and sad between Mello’s fingers. He slid down in the water until his cheek was resting against the tub.

“‘M sorry.”

“For what?”

“I dunno. I don’t know why I’m like this. It’s not like I have any, like, real problems.”

“You have depression, Matt.”

Matt wrinkled his nose and frowned, like this was some kind of unpleasant news and not something he’d been diagnosed with at age twelve.

Mello allowed him to stay under the water until he was fully pruned. Then he bundled him straight from the bath into a towel and then to bed, shoving and pushing Matt’s heavy, unwieldy body on the mattress until there was room for Mello too.

After fifteen minutes of silence, Matt said suddenly, “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

“I found one of your pill bottles in the trash once, at Wammy’s.”

“You dug through the trash to look for my shit?”

“I found it,” Mello insisted.

“Like a raccoon,” Matt snickered.

“Why don’t you like taking your meds?”

“They make me feel weird. Like, I can’t get horny on them.”

“Seriously, Matt.”

“I am serious.” But Matt was clearly angling for a distraction, scooching his damp, towel-wrapped ass around against Mello’s crotch. “This bed is too crowded,” he muttered as Mello looped his arms around his chest.

“Then get off.”

“It’s my fucking bed, dude. Why don’t you get off?”

“ _Your_ bed?”

“‘Cause I’m the only one who sleeps in it.” Matt backed up and squashed him into the wall as he said this, so Mello bit him in the fleshy juncture of neck and shoulder.

“Fatass.”

“Ah, ow.”

“I’m suffocating back here.”

“Mm-hm.”

Matt made encouraging sounds when Mello slipped a hand up under the towel’s ragged edge. He groaned a little as Mello pressed hard into the hollow behind his balls, lifting his right leg to lay over the edge of Mello’s hip. The space between Matt’s legs was obscenely warm and wet from the bath. Mello could feel himself losing focus.

“We need to talk about this,” he demanded. He pressed the ridge of his thumbnail against the base of his dick and felt Matt bite his other wrist where it lay under Matt’s chin. He swatted his thigh. “Don’t bite me.”

Matt’s teeth released; his breath fogged over Mello’s hand. “Unh, uh-huh.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah, but can we like not talk about this right now?”

“Why not?”

“Dude, ‘cause…” Matt was fumbling at Mello behind his back, trying to get into his pants. Inspired by this, Mello caught his scrabbling hand, held his wrist in one hand while he unzipped and laid himself against Matt’s ass. Pressing closer, he put his chin on Matt’s shoulder so he could look down and watch him swell as he forced his arm up the middle of his back.

“Ow, ow. Ah, god.”

“Yes?”

Matt forgot to snipe, too busy grinding himself backwards into Mello.

There was no triumph like hearing him whisper, “Fuck me, please.” Even killing Kira, thought Mello, wouldn’t be quite the same.

()

Afterwards, lying naked in the afternoon sun with Mello staring straight into his eyes, Matt felt himself sweating. Shit was a little intense.

“Dude, are you checking my pupils?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s so rude, dude. Holy shit.”

“It’s rude to stare at someone’s scars, too.”

Matt didn’t bother denying it. Daylight wasn’t kind on the burn. The skin looked like snake scales or storms on Jupiter; not like anything that belonged on a human being. It was kind of crazy that Matt could just reach out and touch it whenever he wanted, which he did, just under his jaw. Mello didn’t bite his finger off, just glared fit to start a fire, which counted as progress in Matt’s book.

“If you didn’t wanna be stared at, maybe you shouldn’t have blown yourself up.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“You actually did. You just chose not to lose, is all.” Matt shrugged. “It was dumb. I mean, I’d definitely have surrendered.”

“What would you have done if I’d surrendered?”

“I dunno. Try to rescue you?”

“And that’s not dumb?”

“It’s at least less.”

“Not that much less.”

“Alright, fine. Point taken. All I’m saying is, people are gonna wanna look. I mean, you’re probably the worst most people will see in their—”

“Go ahead and fucking rub it in.”

“—day-to-day lives unless they’re like, an EMT or a fucking trauma surgeon or something. I’m not trying to rub it in. Can’t you take pride in it?”

“In fucking looking like this?”

“Yeah, in fucking looking like that.”

“Why should I?”

“Because it means you won. By some definition of winning.”

“Maybe it was stupid.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You literally just said the exact same thing.”

“Yeah, but I’m allowed to because it’s me. That’s practically my job, like, fucking ego gate-keeping you. Making sure your head doesn’t get to be the size of the moon.” He shuffled forwards to put a seam of the scar in his mouth. “Do you really not believe that it looks badass?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It doesn’t gross you out?”

“Nah, not anymore. Can you feel it when I do this?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Mello murmured. “Sort of. There’s pressure.”

Matt’s tongue traveled slowly down the ridged border dividing his shoulder, like riding the rumble strip on a freeway. “I like this. Like, knowing where I am on you without looking. I’m gonna have this memorized someday.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“It won’t be hard. I’m a quick learner.”

Matt’s worship made Mello shy. “Stop drooling on me,” he said. His shoulder bumped abruptly out of Matt’s mouth, clacking his teeth, as he reached over him for one of the dusty bottles on the nightstand.

“Take one.”

“Nah.”

“Take one, and then we can get up and have lunch. I can hear your stomach fucking grumbling. I can’t carry you everywhere.”

“You definitely could, man. And I don’t wanna get up. Feed me in bed.”

Mello rolled his eyes as Matt snickered happily at his own innuendo. He popped one of the powder-blue pills into his own mouth, frowning at the bitter coating, and then leaned over Matt and kissed at him until his stubborn mouth softened, allowed Mello’s tongue in to slip its package from one cheek to another, like putting your hand in your lover’s pocket.

“Swallow.”

Matt swallowed.

Good. “Take it yourself, tomorrow,” said Mello, sitting up abruptly. “I’m not doing this for you every time.”

()

At the kitchen table, Mello admitted that he had worn headphones when Matt was going through withdrawal because the sound of Matt hurt his heart.

The moral of this story was supposed to be how practical and solutions-oriented Mello was, how he acknowledged his limits and worked around them. But Matt wasn’t really listening, had gotten hung up on the part where Mello tacitly admitted that he loved him.

“—and he asks me if I think I can get the guy. I told him, I’ll get him in a fucking week, if _you_ could just get me the fucking—”

Matt kissed Mello mid-sentence so he would stop using his mouth to praise himself and instead use it confess farther to Matt.

Having access to the parts of Mello that he could never make rough was Matt’s favorite thing. Mello’s hand might be for shooting, his arm for hitting and his leg for kicking, but the inside of his lip was for Matt and Matt alone.

And Mello _would_ feed him his medicine every time, he’d decided. He just hadn’t let him know yet. He smiled into Mello’s mouth, and Mello said, “What’re you laughing at?”

“Nothing, dude.”

He’d fight him about it tomorrow, and he’d win, Matt thought. This was the way it had to be from now on.


End file.
